Thousands of customers were once again blocked from their NatWest and RBS mobile banking apps 28 March as the system collapsed under payday traffic.

This outage was experienced for over two hours as frustrated customers tried to access their accounts to view payments and try to pay bills.

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The latest outage is a repeat of the same problem on 28 February, which lasted from around 7am until mid afternoon.

In a statement RBS blamed the outage on the same high traffic issues that were experienced last month, adding that it was a particularly busy morning being "a Friday, a pay day and prior to the end of the tax year".

"Our mobile banking service was experiencing record usage between 07:08 and 09:20 this morning. Over 5,700 customers were logging on every minute."

"Unfortunately some customers may have found they were unable to login due to the high traffic. The service is now running normally, we apologise to those affected."

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The issues come just weeks after RBS’s head of retail banking, Ross McEwan, announced a £700m investment in the UK’s retail division over the next five years.

McEwan has expressed his wish for RBS to be the UK’s best retail bank stating: "There’s a big space there for it. I’ve not met anyone who believes there’s great retail banking in the UK," he said.

There are some technical issues to be sorted out before RBS will be able to take this title. There has been a long line of technical faults experienced by the banks, including a software update last June that left it struggling to resolve a backlog of tens of millions of transactions and a payment system failure in December.

Reputations have taken a further hit as customers took to Twitter to vent their frustration with the applications on the RBS and NatWest pages.

Comments included: "Really like the new feature on the RBS online banking app when it never works when you need it. Innovative"

And: "Another payday, another blackout for @NatWest_Help app. If it happens next month, I’ll be looking at @santanderuk or @first_direct #natwest".

Whilst some reputational damage may be sustained, Denis Margolin, VP of mobile at DataArt UK, is not inclined to give much attention to the recent incident and highlights the banks’ faster recovery time.

Margolin sais: "Every system will eventually fail. It’s a question of how much damage the failure will do and how quickly the recovery will be made. RBS definitely did a good job returning the service back to normal in just a few hours, a stunning contrast with the Blackberry outage that happened in 2012 and lasted days.

"It’s hard to say what caused the outage, but RBS acted quick here and that’s a good thing."