Bank of America customers seeing $0 balances amid nationwide outage

Tens of thousands of Bank of America customers have reported a network outage preventing them from accessing their bank accounts or seeing a $0 balance.

Reports of service issues started to come in at about 4:26 pm UTC on Oct. 2 and peaked about one hour later with nearly 18,000 Bank of America customers reporting issues within a 15-minute interval, data from real-time network outage platform Downdetector shows.

Around 98% of the reports made related to Bank of America’s mobile and online banking apps.

Bank of America hasn’t issued a public statement addressing the issues, however, it reportedly told CNN that the network outages have “largely been resolved.”

Several comments on Downdetector confirms the issue hasn’t been fixed for everyone. 

“Everyone is saying it’s fixed, it’s not!!” a user named Corey wrote. 

“Still not fixed been out at least EIGHT hours!” another user, Buff Barnaby added. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of Bank of America customers have slammed the bank over the IT glitch, some noted that they had a $0 balance, but their debt wasn’t wiped.

“My money is gone but conveniently my debt is still there. Bank of America sucks,” X user Anchor Baby said.

The issues weren’t confined to Bank of America’s mobile app either, according to X user Kerim.

“Went to branch and they are not allowing deposits or withdrawals.”

Other customers reportedly said the ATMs would not show their account balance, but they were still able to withdraw cash.

Cointelegraph reached out to Bank of America but didn’t receive an immediate response outside of business hours. 

While most impacted Bank of America customers responded with anxiety and anger, others made light-hearted humor of the ordeal:

Everyone refreshing their Bank of America account to see if its still $0 pic.twitter.com/wUHR5Q1T7a

— Conald Peterson (@WhyGarth) October 2, 2024

Some Bitcoiners pointed to the Bank of America’s failure to show why people should consider self-custodying funds, while others pointed to Bitcoin’s impressive uptime record.

Bitcoin hasn’t suffered a network outage since March 2013 when the network was still largely centralized, Bitbo’s Bitcoin Uptime tracker shows.

But that can’t be said for all blockchains. Solana, Canto, Zilliqa and Linea and Canto have all halted at least once this year. Several crypto exchanges like BitForex and Lykke also halted withdrawals after being hacked earlier this year.

In another incident, thousands of Americans were paid late last November when the Federal Reserve’s Automated Clearing House — a payment network used by businesses to transfer wages into employee bank accounts — suffered a network outage.

Related: Major Swiss bank ZKB launches Bitcoin and Ether trading

Bank of America’s (BAC) share price wasn’t impacted by the IT glitch, trading relatively flat on Oct. 2, Google Finance data shows.

BAC’s share price also withstood $338 million worth of sell orders from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway between Sept. 30 and Oct. 2, Bloomberg reported.

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