- All Federal Reserve settlement services suffered disruptions on Wednesday
- The key banking systems were offline for more than three hours
- Fed says that the massive outage was caused by an ‘operational error’
- Systems affected form the backbone of US banking and financial sector
- Fedwire is used by banks to transfer an average of $3.3 trillion every day
- FedACH handles smaller transactions such as paychecks and tax refunds
The Federal Reserve payment systems used to settle transactions between U.S. financial institutions suffered a massive disruption due to an ‘operational error’.
The system used by U.S. banks to execute some $3 trillion in transactions daily began suffering outages at around 11.15am Eastern time on Wednesday, and remained down for more than three hours.
‘A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines,’ a Fed spokesman told DailyMail.com in a statement. ‘We have restored services and communicated with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations.’
Most of the key systems, including the backbone settlement services Fedwire and FedACH, were back online by 3pm, but the Fed acknowledged that payment deadlines were ‘impacted’ during the outage.
JUST IN: The Fed’s system that allows banks to send money back and forth is downt.co/lW8LZhA11Y
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) February 24, 2021