Jun 29 2015

Britain's worst bank? A history of NatWest and RBS outages and technical meltdowns

A total of 600,000 transfers were affected by a technical glitch in RBS Group banks RBS, Ulster, Coutts and NatWest accounts on 17 June, leaving thousands of customers without benefits, wages or other payments. It is the fifth outage in three years and, compared to former crashes, it is a relatively small one.

In December 2013, after RBS systems went down on the most popular online shopping day of the year, chief executive Ross McEwan said: "For decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems.

"We need to put our customers' needs at the centre of all we do. It will take time, but we are investing heavily in building IT systems our customers can rely on."
A year and a half later, an RBS outage angered thousands of customers when it said their payments might be delayed up to four days - and that wasn't the last of the company's problems.
Now, IBTimes UK looks at the litany of RBS Group outages over the last three years.

19 June 2012
The notorious RBS and NatWest 'meltdown' was caused by a botched software update, according to the bank. In the biggest of all the fallouts to date, millions of customers were unable to access their account through internet banking or cash machines.
Many branches stayed open for extra hours to assist customers. The outage caused former CEO Stephen Hester to apologise to customers publicly and give up his yearly bonus.
27 March 2013
Due to a hardware fault, less than a year after RBS and NatWest's first major account failure, thousands of accounts were out of reach and many customers turned to social media to express their anger and some announced they were moving to other banks. Customers started tweeting with the hashtags #RBSfail and #NatWestfail.
2 December 2013
An outage on the first day of December, quickly nicknamed 'Cyber Monday Outage', caused thousands of customers to be unable to use their internet banking on the most popular online shopping day of the year and bankcards were faulty as well. RBS, Ulster and NatWest were all hit by this outage and around a million customers were furious they missed out on crazy discounts and delivery deals.
6 December 2013
RBS Group's fourth online failure in 18 moths only came a couple of days after the Cyber Monday Outage. The company said it was a deliberate cyberattack that caused the second failure that week and crashed the NatWest website.
"This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack," a spokesperson said at the time.
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