Nationwide Outage Caused by Federal Reserve Network Issues

Yet another disruption in payments service. And this time the Federal Reserve is also involved.

It began with a surge of outages reported at Capital One and then other banks’ transactions started experiencing a delay in direct deposits.

According to Capital One, what happened was network issues at the Federal Reserve that was causing curtains transactions to be delayed.

The 10th largest bank in the United States by assets, Capital One said it is working with the Fed and will make sure transactions are posted as soon as the issue is resolved.

The Bitcoin network has been functional for 99.98% of the time since its inception on Jan 3, 2009.https://t.co/t7quJcEnV3

— Rhythm (@Rhythmtrader) December 19, 2019

“Bitcoin up time since 2013? 100%” is Dan Held, Director of Business Development at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken’s response to this outage.

Disruption in FedACH Services

Capital One and other banks’ customers on Twitter have been complaining that their direct deposits have been delayed.

The Fed in the meanwhile navigated the second disruption in 2019 of a payments service. Jean Tate, a spokeswoman at the Atlanta Fed, that host central bank’s Retail Payments Office, said in an emailed statement,

“The FedACH service, which processes transactions for commercial banks, is currently operating normally after experiencing delays in processing yesterday afternoon and early this morning.”

Automated Clearinghouse Service (ACH) is a national system that processes electronic fund transfers of social security benefits, payroll, and tax refunds among others. She added,

“Some customers experienced delays in receiving confirmations of yesterday’s transactions. Federal Reserve technical staff continue to investigate the root cause of the issue.”

A Fed website dedicated to the central bank’s payment processing services put up a notice at 9:57 am. New York time on Thursday stating, “the FedACH Services application began experiencing disruption on December 18 at 3:30 p.m.” Wednesday.

Now the notification says “resolved.”

This has been the second disruption to a Fed-run payment service this year. Before this, it has been FedWire interbank funds transfer services that went down for three hours on April 1st.

At that time, the Fed blamed the outage on “an internal technical issue,” without any further detail.