NatWest and RBS down, infuriating Black Friday online shoppers

With Black Friday sales underway, bargain-hunting customers of RBS and NatWest have been frustrated by a spate of online and mobile crashes disabling access to accounts.

Timing couldn’t be worse for the bank, with millions of UK customers hoping to score a Black Friday bargain on payday unable to complete transactions.

Problems began just before 9am this morning, with outage monitor Down Detector showing over 2500 reports of problems across the NatWest and RBS online and mobile banking services.

Just last week Which? released analysis into UK banks this week, finding that the UK's banks experience five IT failures a week, with RBS and Santander fingered as the worst offenders.

Missing out on Black Friday sales won’t just be a pain for avid shoppers, but merchants rely on the boon that the annual sale provides and consumers are increasingly using their smartphones to make purchases.

Deloitte has forecast that 2019 will be the first year in which more than 50% of shoppers use their smartphone in some capacity for festive shopping online.

Fifty-two per cent of those surveyed state they will use their smartphone in holiday shopping, compared to 40% and 46% in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Shopping on desktop computers sees a 1% decrease to 75% while tablets hold steady at 22%.

Zach Aron, payments leader at Deloitte told Finextra: "We are seeing an increase in smartphone use for online shopping every year,” Aron says. “We don’t believe we’ve hit the plateau yet by any means.