Customers of Natwest and RBS banks were left without access to either their accounts or their money today, with an IT failure that lasted for a number of hours.
Natwest’s customer service Twitter account first Tweeted about the issues at 8.43 this morning:
Apologies our systems are experiencing some issues this morning.We are working hard to resolve these.AF
— NatWest Help (@NatWest_Help) June 21, 2012
The account continued to Tweet their apologies throughout the day, but seemed to be unaware of any possible explanation for the outage or a likely timescale for resolution.
The issues meant that many Natwest, RBS and Ulster Bank customers were unable to access their online accounts, and some were finding that expected payments had not made it to their accounts. There was also some confusion about whether affected customers should use other banks’ ATM machines without causing problems.
Some disgruntled customers took to Twitter to moan, that was until Twitter itself succumbed to a hack and crashed for a few hours this evening.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Natwest announced that some of the issues had been resolved, but that some online banking functionality was still unavailable. They also kept some branches open until 7pm this evening, and most branches will open at 8am tomorrow morning. The banks have stated that no one will be left out of pocket should they have incurred charges from missed payments.
Natwest also added a statement to their website (still no explanation as to why it had happened), nicely placed above promo for their award winning, secure online banking:
So secure, nobody can get into it.
Were you affected by today’s outage to Natwest, RBS and Ulster Bank? Share your experiences in the comments below.
I agree with you that they really got lot of problems that is why I shifted my business transaction accounts to Barclay’s.
Thank you for clearing this issue.