On February 24, the Federal Reserve suffered a widespread outage across many of its payment services, including a system that banks and businesses to move trillions of dollars around the financial system. After experiencing problems for several hours, operations to the critical payment system, known as Fedwire, shortly before 3 p.m. ET, the Fed said in a statement. However, some of its other services remain down.
The Federal Reserve said in a statement that the outage was due to an "operational error," and added that it was working to restore services and communication with its customers as soon as possible.
Banks, businesses, and government agencies rely on Fedwire to move huge amounts of money around the U.S. banking system. As we mentioned earlier, over $3 trillion is transferred through Fedwire every day.
The problems were widespread. Fed staff noticed an outage across the bank’s services starting at 11:15 a.m. ET, according to a message posted on the Fed’s website . Specifically, the message said: “Our technical teams have determined that the cause of the outage is a Federal Reserve operational error .” In addition, in a statement, the Fed said it has taken steps to ensure the resiliency of Fedwire service applications, while taking steps to pinpoint the problem.
As CNN reports, it is not yet clear exactly how many banks and companies are affected by this outage.
Gemini , a cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, also said some of its systems were experiencing outages due to the outage at the Federal Reserve. However, Gemini clarified that all funds remain safe and that it is investigating the issue.
