"Friday morning, the online systems of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank and Natwest — all part of the RBS Banking Group — crashed in unison, leaving millions of customers unable to pay bills or view their balance on their online and mobile accounts... After around five hours of chaos, the RBS Group announced that the problems had been resolved. The failure had apparently been caused by a “technical glitch” — a word that is being used with increasing frequency by high-street lenders — in a regular update to their firewall. On Thursday, it was the turn of the UK’s largest bank, Barclays, whose website and telephone banking service crashed for around seven hours, leaving frustrated customers locked out of their online accounts... A few days earlier an outage at online challenger bank Cashplus, which targets people with poor credit histories, left customers unable to access their accounts, make cash withdrawals, or make or receive payments... Bottom line-obsessed bank executives are always looking for cheap, short-term shortcuts to IT issues, with the result that lenders — particularly, but not only, in the UK — have for decades under-invested in their sprawling, creaking, accident-prone legacy systems dating back to the primeval age of COBOL and mainframe technology..." https://wolfstreet.com/2018/09/21/u...go-down-barclays-rbs-natwest-ulster-cashplus/
NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank hit by website outage August 27, 2019 https://www.itpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/34276/natwest-rbs-ulster-bank-hit-by-website-outage
