Twitter user @NatWest inundated with tweets over RBS IT fiasco

27 Jun 2012

A 22-year-old woman from Newcastle in the UK called Natalie Westerman who goes by the name of @NatWest on Twitter has been hit with tsunami of tweets from irate NatWest customers in the midst of the enduring IT glitch that has hit the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) network.

According to the BBC, Westerman discovered last Sunday night that she had suddenly become very popular for all the wrong reasons and spent most of the night redirecting angry bank customers.

“I never felt so popular in my life,” she said. “I am a person called Nat West, not a bank.”

Her good-humoured handling of the mistaken identity as she redirected them to @NatWest_help earned Westerman praise from fellow Twitter users and helped grow her following from 79 to 400.

It emerged today that RBS is in discussions about taking legal action against US enterprise software giant CA because of the computer update that caused the massive backlog that disrupted banking services for thousands of banking customers in Ireland and the UK.

The software glitch triggered a backlog in processing payments, which won’t be cleared until next week.

Customers will have to wait until early next week for normal service to be restored, Ulster Bank’s parent company RBS said in a statement yesterday.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com