RBS: Friday payment problems only affected 10 per cent of customers

Latest RBS outage fixed following afternoon of payments frustration for customers

RBS, the nationalised bank that owns NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank, claims that the payment problems that plagued customers on Friday afternoon only affected around 10 per cent of customers.

In a statement issued to Computing after the organisation claimed to have resolved the problems, it also added that customers would not be left out of pocket.

"Our debit cards are now working as normal. We apologise to those who experienced difficulties this afternoon. No customer will be left permanently out of pocket," it claimed in the statement, issued late on Friday evening.

It added: "Ninety per cent of debit card transactions were processing normally during this period and our ATM network and credit card transactions were unaffected," the statement added.

The company's Twitter helpline was flooded with complaints from around 1pm on Friday from anxious and angry customers who had been turned down at the till. Customers had also had online payments declined, and even deposits.

One customer, Tom Capel, explained that online payments stop at the Verified by Visa stage.

Another NatWest customer, Richard Fenton, said that his debit card payment was turned down at a branch of Waterstones but that he was able to withdraw cash from a nearby ATM.

The bank admitted the problems when we contacted the press office, and indicated that they had begun at around 1pm.

The bank later issued a public statement online that it was "aware of some issues with debit card payments" and is "working hard to fix them".

The incident is just the latest in a series of IT problems at RBS.

In 2012, it suffered a major outage that shut customers out of their accounts for several days. Writing in Computing, a former member of staff claimed that the Bank's IT organisation suffered from poor source-code control.

"Nobody knew what code was running in the production system. In fact, there was a high degree of confusion regarding where the code was in general. Some was stored on individual developers' PCs," he claimed.

The bank reportedly extracted compensation from its supplier, CA Technologies, over the 2012 outage, which cost it £56m in fines and around £125m to fix.

In 2015, it suffered further downtime, which was attributed to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.