Fed Restores Some Services After Outage on ‘Operational Error’

(Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve began restoring some services Wednesday afternoon following widespread outages across several key payment systems operated by the U.S. central bank.

“A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines,” Jim Strader, a spokesman for the Richmond Fed, said in an e-mailed statement. “We are restoring services and are communicating with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations.”

The Fed has restored the automated clearinghouse system known as FedACH as well as its Fedwire Funds, Fedwire Securities, Central Bank, National Settlement and FedCash services, according to a website operated by the central bank. Other services including Account Services, Check 21 and Check Adjustments were still suffering outages as of 3:01 p.m. New York time.

The Fed website noted the disruptions were discovered around 11:15 a.m.

ACH is a national system that processes batches of electronic funds transfers such as payroll, social security benefits, tax refunds, corporate payments to vendors and utility payments, according to the Fed’s website. The commercial service handled 62.1 million transactions a day on average in 2019 with an average value of $1,802, the latest year for which data are available.

The Fed suffered two significant disruptions to the payment system services in 2019.

In a posting on its website at 2:46 p.m. the Fed said it was taking steps to ensure the resilience of its services but urged customers to double check that any messages they had sent or received had been reconciled.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.