US Fed outage disrupts financial transactions

All services were restored by 7:27 p.m. New York time, according to a website operated by the central bank. The outages affected the automated clearinghouse system known as FedACH and the Fedwire Funds interbank transfer service as well as several other systems comprising the US payment infrastructure.

Systems were restored by the end of the day, still the outages raise questions about the resilience of the critical infrastructure used by the Americans to process payments. According to the online publication, the episode follows two significant disruptions to the Fed’s payment services that occurred in 2019.

The Fed system’s national IT operations are run out of the Richmond reserve bank. In an e-mailed statement Jim Strader, a spokesman for the Richmond Fed, declined to comment on whether they were a result of system updates or human error but confirmed that the system maintains operations in other locations.