Transactions potentially worth trillions of dollars were left hanging after the Federal Reserve payment system crashed.
The payment system, which is used by the banks in the US to transfer over three trillion dollars per day, was reportedly down for several hours after crashing on Wednesday at 11.15 am Eastern time.
While the Federal Reserve Bank managed to fix the issue by 2.46 pm, the disruption resulted in temporary freezing of various financial transactions including paychecks and tax refunds which are typically managed through FedACH.
Among the payment systems affected by the disruption was also Fedwire, a system responsible for the handling of bigger transactions that saw over $3.3 trillion worth of transactions per day last year.
“A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines. We have restored services and communicated with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations,” a spokesperson confirmed in a statement to DailyMail.com.
According to the reports, the “disruption for all services” of the payment system was acknowledged at 11.15 am on Wednesday.
In an update at 12.43 pm, the Fed confirmed: “The Federal Reserve Bank staff is currently investigating a possible issue or disruption to multiple services.”
“We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue,” they added in the following hour.
In an update at 2.14 pm, the service wrote: “Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error. We will provide updates via service status as more information becomes available.”
By 2.55 pm, both FedACH and Fedwire were back online, whereas officials confirmed that steps have been taken “to help ensure the resilience of the Fedwire and NSS applications, including recovery to the point of failure.”
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Replaced!