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NatWest and RBS suffer online outage as MPs attack banks for IT failures

The screen that greeted NatWest customers after they were unable to access their online accounts
The screen that greeted NatWest customers after they were unable to access their online accounts

NatWest has joined the litany of lenders hit by online banking failures, prompting MPs to criticise banks for failing to protect customers from IT crashes.

NatWest and its parent company Royal Bank of Scotland's online banking services went down on Friday morning, less than 24 hours after rival Barclays' systems went down for several hours.

Customers of NatWest and RBS were unable to access their accounts between 5am and around 10.30am, when the bank said it had fixed the problems.

Nicky Morgan, chairman of the powerful Treasury select committee, wrote to the chief executives of both RBS and Barclays demanding an explanation for what had gone wrong.

She said: “It simply isn’t good enough to expose customers to IT failures, including delays in paying bills and an inability to access their own money."

"High street banks justify the closure of their branch networks on the basis that they are providing a seamless online and mobile phone banking service. These justifications carry little weight if their banking apps and websites cannot be relied upon."

During early Friday morning users of NatWest's app encountered an error message stating it was "unable to establish a connection", while the bank's website displayed a message saying online banking was "temporarily unavailable".

NatWest and RBS customers took to social media to complain about the issue, saying they would be unable to pay their bills or access their money, on what for many is payday.

One Twitter user wrote: "Just got paid and I can’t spend any money... NatWest app is down and my card is being declined."

The problems were understood to have been caused by a firewall upgrade by RBS overnight, although investigations are ongoing.

Nicky Morgan, chairman of the Treasury select committee - Credit: John Nguyen/JNVisuals
Nicky Morgan, chairman of the Treasury select committee, criticised RBS and Barclays for the IT failures Credit: John Nguyen/JNVisuals

An RBS spokesman said: “We would like to apologise to customers who experienced issues logging into their online and mobile banking accounts this morning, this issue has now been resolved.”

In 2012, NatWest, RBS, and sister firm Ulster Bank suffered a major online banking outage that left millions of customers unable to access their accounts for days.

RBS was later fined £56m by regulators for what it admitted were "unacceptable weaknesses in our systems".

A bungled system switch at TSB in April led to several days of outages to online banking systems and ultimately cost its chief executive Paul Pester his job and a £2m bonus. Tesco Bank also suffered a short-lived four-hour crash in June.

Following the string of recent outages City regulators at the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have demanded lenders improve their IT resilience.