Bank of America's online banking website crashed on Friday, February 1st in the US leaving customers temporarily unable to access their accounts.
From late morning Friday, customers trying to log on saw a message that said the site was "temporarily unavailable."
"We're aware of the online banking issue and addressing as quickly as possible," says a spokesman for the bank. "We're also working closely with our customers to help alleviate any concerns."
According to the Bites blog on The New York Times, the bank's online and mobile payment systems had been down since 11 a.m. Eastern time. The customer service telephone lines were also down Friday morning but were restored hours later. The representative described the outage as a "whole system failure" and said that even Bank of America employees were not able to see customers' accounts for several hours.
The New York Times reported that a person close to Bank of America said the problem appeared to stem from an internal breakdown, rather than a cyberattack, but the bank continued to investigate.
Meanwhile, the banks kept their customers informed of progress on the outage via Twitter.