Customers of The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)
and NatWest were locked out of their online accounts this weekend
due to maintenance work which went wrong.

The online service disruptions affected
approximately 15m customers.

Some RBS and NatWest customers did not have
their account balances updated overnight, nor were their accounts
credited with receipts.

The technical disruptions also affected some
RBS and NatWest customers who were not been able to make
withdrawals from ATMs as funds had not cleared.

In a statement to RBI, RBS has said
that the online banking and telephone banking services are now
“running largely as normal”, and account balances have been
updated.

“The issues emerged as a result of major
system changes that took place overnight on Friday. We are
disappointed that we were not able to fully resolve all of the
issues in the timescales that we wanted.

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“Additional resources were mobilised,
including extra staff in our branches on Saturday with a number of
our branches extending their opening hours. We will keep our
customers fully informed and apologise once again for the
inconvenience this has caused.”

RBS also said it will “refund all charges
applied as a result of this weekend’s problems” to customers.

The RBS and NatWest technical difficulties
follow HSBC’s technical disruptions to its online banking services
and some of its ATMs that took place on Friday afternoon for over
two hours.

The error affected some HSBC debit card
payments in stores as well.

The bank’s customer services team had to use
Twitter to let customers know that HSBC were working to fix the
problem.

Problems were also reported during the same
time for customers of First Direct, part of the HSBC group, who
were unable to access their online accounts.

HSBC has not confirmed how many of its ATMs
had been affected by the technical error. HSBC’s ATM facilities
could not be used during this phase and HSBC cards could not be
used on other banks ATMs either.