Nationwide Outage Causes Disruption To Thousands Of Bank Of America Customers

Tens of thousands of Bank of America customers have reported a network outage that is hindering access to their bank accounts and displaying a $0 balance. Issues with the service began surfacing around 4:26 PM UTC on October 2nd, peaking roughly an hour later when nearly 18,000 customers reported problems within a 15-minute window, according to real-time outage monitoring platform Downdetector.

Still A Lot Of Work To Do

Approximately 98% of the aforementioned reports were related to mobile and online banking applications. Although Bank of America has not released a public statement regarding the outages, it has reportedly informed CNN that the network issues have largely been resolved. However, several comments on Downdetector still indicate that the problem remains unresolved for some users.

Unsurprisingly, many customers have expressed frustration over the IT glitch, noting that while their balances appeared as $0, their debts were still intact. Issues also extended beyond the mobile app, as the bank was also apparently not allowing deposits or withdrawals. Other customers indicated that ATMs were unable to display their account balances, though they could still withdraw cash.

Crypto Could Be The Answer

Many crypto enthusiasts pointed to these difficulties as a reason to consider self-custody of funds, highlighting the strong uptime record displayed by Bitcoin (BTC). The flagship crypto has not experienced a network outage since March 2013, when it was still largely centralized, according to the Bitbo Bitcoin Uptime tracker.

However, this reliability does not extend to all blockchains. Solana, Canto, Zilliqa, and Linea have all experienced at least one halt this year, and several cryptocurrency exchanges, including BitForex and Lykke, suspended withdrawals after hacks earlier in the year.

Despite the IT issues, Bank of America saw its share price remain stable on October 2nd, as reported by Google Finance. Additionally, the share price managed to withstand $338 million in sell orders by Berkshire Hathaway between September 30th and October 2nd, according to Bloomberg.