Stephen Hester, CEO of RBS, has said that he will not receive a bonus this year, the BBC reports, in light of the IT outage that denied thousands of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers access to their accounts for many days.

It will be the second year in a row that Hester has waived his bonus. He forwent his 2011 bonus of nearly £1 million following public outcry.

There were calls for Hester to waive his bonus earlier this week. Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott told Sky News that there was "no question" he should waive this year's bonus.

"Like the boss of a water company who has turned customers' taps off for a week, there is no question in my mind that Stephen Hester should not be eligible for a bonus for 2012 after this fiasco," he said.

The Guardian reported today that many customers are still unable to access money through cash machines or online, then days after the problems started.

The root cause of the incident has been traced to a failed update of RBS's batch processing system, based on CA Technologies' CA_7 software.

There had been reports that the system was operated from India, prompting criticism of RBS's use of offshore IT resources. However, an RBS spokesperson told Information Age earlier this week that "the software error occurred in Edinburgh, the team controlling the software are based in Edinburgh, and the recovery is being managed from Edinburgh."