RBS says UK -- not Indian -- IT staff caused outage
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has told MPs that its Edinburgh-based IT staff were responsible for the systems failure that affected millions of customers for more than a week last month.
It contradicts media reports that claimed a junior IT worker based in India made the error that led to the IT problem that affected 17 million customers of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank.
An upgrade made to batch processing software CA 7 from CA Technologies is believed to be at the heart of the failure, and RBS was given until the end of last week to provide a preliminary explanation of the problems to the Treasury Select Committee. In his letter to Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the committee, Stephen Hester wrote: "The initial reviews we have carried out indicate that the problem was created when maintenance on systems, which are managed and operated by our team in Edinburgh, caused an error in our batch scheduler.