A NatWest spokesman has revealed that the fault which made key customer services unavilable to millions on Wednesday 6th of March for a number of hours, was due to a mainframe hardware fault.

The mainframe error effected customers of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank, stopping users accessing online banking service, cash machines or from making payments.

The inability to access services brought back memories of a three day service outage effecting RBS services in June 2012. However the two similar incidents are not connected according to RBS.

The impact of the service disruption seems to have varied from customer to customer, with some users still being unable to access services on the following day.

A RBS spokesman said: “This problem was caused by a hardware fault and was not related to the issues we experienced last summer.”

RBS say offshoring services to India were not responsible for IT outage