On 24 February 2021, for about four hours, Federal Reserve systems that execute millions of financial transactions a day were disrupted by an internal glitch, according to Bloomberg.
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.
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