Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its retail banking business NatWest have reported failure of their payment systems, resulting in blockage of hundreds of transactions when customers were making purchases on the busiest online shopping days, Cyber Monday.

The technology glitch not only affected debit and credit card payments, but also online transfers and purchases. It also denied customers access to online bank statements.

The failure in payment system was the third time for the bank in 18 months. Earlier, the system failed in March 2013 and in June 2012, affecting the bank’s 12 million current account customers.

Back in June 2012, the lender blamed a software update for the failure, however, did not give details about the latest failure.

Following the glitch in March 2013, RBS faced a probe by the Financial Conduct Authority in April 2013.

RBS spokesperson said they are very sorry for the system issues that affected their customers.

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"We will confirm when all systems have returned to normal service," spokesperson added.

"If customers have been left out of pocket as a result of these system problems, we will put this right."