According to some, the need for Bitcoin (BTC) and decentralized digital money was just validated as a financial institution in the U.S. has suddenly gone offline.
Over the past hour, reports have flooded in from thousands of Twitter users, including an NBC reporter, regarding Bank of America’s services. These users, which again, count in the thousands, have said that they are unable to access the institution’s services, both online and in the real world. Both the firm’s login portal for clients and ATMs are claimed by Bank of America clients to be down.
“Looks like all online account services for Bank of America are currently offline or not allowing logins. This is the first I’ve seen a major bank have an outage like this,” an individual wrote, adding that there is no clear way to tell if the bank is seeing a service outage.
The US Banking system is fine — you should only worry about systemic risks if you live in Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong, Turkey, Greece, etc.
(Meanwhile, all ATMs, websites and customer service numbers are currently down).
— Jeff Dorman, CFA (@jdorman81)
But per statistics from Downdectctor.com, there have been over 10,000 “problems” reported with Bank of America over the past two hours, with outages spanning all populated regions of the U.S, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, New York, Chicago, and so on.
This could be normal server maintenance — companies at this scale have to tune-up their servers every once and a while — yet many on Twitter and on forums claim that this bout of downtime comes unannounced. One netizen even went as far as to say that a Bank of America representative he was on the phone with didn’t even know what was going on.
Below is the search interest chart for “Bank of America” from Google Trends. It largely implies that the issues began at around 19:25 PST, and have persisted since then.
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