NatWest online, app and telephone banking customers locked out of their accounts

NatWest outage comes a day after similar disruption at Barclays, which is reportedly facing an investigation

NatWest online, app and telephone banking customers have reported being locked out of their accounts this morning.

NatWest has been apologising to customers via its @NatWestHelp Twitter account.

"We're aware of some issues on our Online and Mobile Banking services and are working hard to fix them. Telephone Banking and ATMs are available. Sorry and thanks for your patience," the bank tweeted this morning.

It's really not good enough when so many customers are being encouraged to bank online

Customers have been locked out their accounts when they tried to access its online banking or mobile app. Ulster Bank and other RBS consumer banking brands are also affected.

Hannah Maundrell, editor in chief of money.co.uk commented: "Frustrating times for NatWest customers this morning, especially ahead of the weekend.

"Banks really need to pull their socks up because this keeps happening again and again. It's really not good enough when so many customers are being encouraged to bank online. It's worrying when your bank can't keep on top of their IT systems."

Banks in other geographies don't have as many problems as UK banks

The NatWest outage comes day after Barclays' customers were affected by a similar service disruption that saw customers unable to access online banking, telephone banking and some branch services for up to six hours on Thursday.

Barclays is reported to be facing an investigation by the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee as a result of this systems failure.

Commenting on the Barclays outage, Lev Lesokhin, senior vice president of strategy & analytics at CAST, the association for software testing, said UK banks seem to be unusually vulnerable to such IT glitches, which are often due to software failures.

"Banks in other geographies don't have as many problems as UK banks. Based on our research, UK banks don't do as good a job controlling the structural quality of their legacy systems. So the UK banking sector has some catching up to do in getting that kind of software intelligence," he said.

Update: 11:08 @NatWest_Help tweeted that its systems are up and running again:

"We would like to apologise to customers who experienced issues logging into their online and mobile banking accounts this morning, this issue has now been resolved."