The bank says “technology related” issues took it offline.
Steven Senne/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Topline: Bank of America, the second-biggest lender in the U.S., had a major outage last night that left thousands of customers around the country locked out of their accounts for over an hour without explanation.
- Reports flooded in over social media last night, with scores of customers saying that their bank accounts and information were inaccessible.
- The outage apparently hit across the country, with Bank of America’s Web login, mobile app, customer service lines and even ATM services all going down. Other customers said they were unable to pay bills and that their debit and credit cards were getting declined.
- Downdetector, a website that provides information about users’ issues with different services, registered more than 9,100 problems at Bank of America last night, starting at around 10:30 p.m. EST and spanning several hours. Most reports were related to online banking (73%) and mobile banking (23%).
- Although several thousand issues were reported, Bank of America has approximately 66 million customers in total.
- Some users speculated that this was part of scheduled maintenance, but others refuted that, saying the bank had not provided any advance updates or answered user concerns during the outage.
- When asked for comment, Bank of America said that the outage was “technology related,” and lasted for about an hour. A spokesperson said that the bank now back to business as usual.
What to watch for: While it appears that the issue has largely been resolved, a few users claim via social media to still have issues with their accounts—and Downdetector shows that some scattered problems are still being reported today.
Tangent: According to Downdetector, Bank of America also had an outage with debit cards last week, with over 800 issues reported.
Big number: Bank of America stock fell nearly 1.5% in morning trading.
Further reading: 4 Things To Do To Survive A Bank Outage (Kelly Anne Smith)
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