The following article is brought to you by Jon Blanchard at O.Canada.Com
Chase Bank issued an uncharacteristic Alert via twitter at 8:28 p.m. (EST) Monday evening, that all customer access to their online and mobile accounts was down.
While the primary bank website remained up, there was no evident alert listed regarding the problem and, while customers could apparently still log in, all accounts showed $0.00 balances.
About an hour prior to the official alert from Chase Bank, messages hash tagged #chase and #chasebank started pouring in from across the United States alerting other customers to the problem and support centers became unreachable under the flood of customer calls.
This is not the first time Chase has suffered an outage, last fall the Bank suffered intermittent connectivity outages across their system that also resulted in Twitter alert users to the problem.
The Sept. 19, 2012, problem came on the heels of several outages for Bank of America the day before, both of which were credited (though not verified) to online protests related to the inflammatory viral video “The Innocence of Muslims.”
While chase bank hasn’t detailed the scope of the problem, customers are reporting that phone banking and debit machines were also down and all customer support channels were only available intermittently.
A multiple system failure like this strongly suggests a much more serious ‘back end’ problem related to the underlying data centers driving electronic banking infrastructure. This is normally no reason for customers to panic, though, as all legitimate banking infrastructures are mirrored and backed up to address exactly this kind of infrastructure failure.
It is, nonetheless, alarming that the system remained offline for several hours on a Monday evening.
While many rumors and false flags were raised about the outage, no group has yet claimed responsibility.
However several prominent members of the hacking community have taken to twitter to taunt the Bank for what appears to be a serious deficiency as regards the stability and reliably of its massive electronic banking infrastructure.
At 11:28 p.m., the company updated their Twitter account to declare that the outage was over.
CHASE – *UPDATE* We’re back to business as usual on chase.com & Mobile. Apologies again for the trouble & thank you for your patience.
This did little to appease the many annoyed customers following the @ChaseSupport twitter account, which had earlier tweeted that the outage was ongoing, that they were signing off for the night and that they would be back at 7:00 a.m. with more news.
The post brought further taunts from users and hackers alike wondering if the closing tag ^PG might be a call for otherworldly assistance from an indulgent banking deity in the face of the spreading wave of consternation (in reality, the notation is usually used to sign a corporate tweet with the initials of its author).
CHASE – We’re signing off for the night, but will keep you updated. We’re truly sorry for this inconvenience. We’ll be back to assist at 7AM ET. ^PG
As interconnected online banking becomes the worldwide norm, broad data system failures like the one experienced by Chase Bank are eroding public confidence in the internationally wired banking network.
In the United States, this outage is being referred to as the “Vanishing balances” and has been widely discussed across Internet forums where account holders are wondering why their money seems to have disappeared in an instant.
A spokesman told CBS News that it was purely a technical issue and not the result of an external attack.
“The problems are an issue with the checking account portion of chase.com, nothing to do with mortgage or credit banking. We have a technology problem regarding customers balance information that we are working to resolve,” the spokesman to CBS News. “It has nothing to do with cyber threats or hacks. It is an internal issue. We are very sorry to our customers for the inconvenience.”
As many insiders are aware, major Banks like Chase have been on the cutting edge of borderless data and cloud-based storage and retrieval for some years. They were on the cutting edge of fail-safe data handling many decades before that.
Experts point out that the back end hardware and optical networking systems in play are at an equally advanced level and that the redundancy and caching strategies baked into the system are built exactly for this kind of outage. Your transaction is stored until the system becomes available again, or the system declines the transaction if the failure precludes authorization routines.
In point of fact it is a requirement, from a purely systems view, that any critical currency storage or retrieval error switches to caching live transaction data while locking down the underlying core read/write system. And, in the event of being unable to authorize transactions, the system must stop outright and decline service.
But, as with all emergency systems, it’s important to ask serious questions when they are triggered. Emergencies, after all, should not become normal occurrences.
It is argued that responsibly developed currency handling systems should never be subject to a shutdown. And, while a fail-safe mode does address the kind of emergencies that apparently befell Chase Bank, the fact the fail-safe triggered at all could indicate a deeper problem in the underlying infrastructure.
Thus, as increasingly lengthy outages on debit and online banking networks are becoming more common, as was the case for several electronic banking service providers across Canada leading up to and through the demanding Christmas sales seasons this winter, concerns are being raised across many sectors of the economy.
Though firm estimates vary, at least a billion dollars move through paypal every hour. Thus networked brick and mortar banks like Chase, where all back end transaction services are further interlinked across both ground based Debit and Credit card networks, obviously suffer very damaging losses in the event of an extended outage.
While no further comment is available regarding the unprecedented 4+ hour disconnect at Chase, it is expected that news of the outage will have to be dealt with over the morning hours if Chase Bank is to avoid a serious penalty on the afternoon markets.
