Will RBS ever learn? Its latest outage was because of a DDoS attack

Bank suffers yet another IT glitch which left customers unable to access their online banking accounts

The latest Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) IT glitch, which left many of its customers unable to access their online banking accounts, was down to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the firm has confirmed.

RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers were affected by the issue on Friday, which lasted a little under an hour.

In a statement, the firm said that the glitch was down to a "surge in internet traffic delivery directed at the website".

"This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a DDoS attack," the bank said, adding that there was no risk to customers.

The bank has been constantly troubled with IT glitches and has had to pay a hefty price for its failures. The biggest of its issues was in 2012 after an IT disaster affected millions of its customers, many of whom were left unable to use even basic services for a period of seven weeks. It was fined £56m for the failure by the Financial Conduct Authority, on top of the £125m bill to fix its systems, and a £2.75m penalty from the Central Bank of Ireland for issues relating to the same IT outage.

In June, more than 600,000 transactions had gone "missing" overnight at RBS, following another IT glitch. A few days later, the company claimed it had found the issue that caused the payments to go astray and had fixed the problem.

And these issues are only those that the bank has had to report to the general public - the firm has also reported data breaches in the past two years to the Information Commissioner's Office, according to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by encryption software provider Egress.