The US Federal Reserve’s system for allowing financial institutions to send money back and forth went down for several hours on Wednesday.
The undisclosed "operational error" led to outages for services Central Bank, Check 21, Check Adjustments, FedACH, FedCash, FedLine Advantage, FedLine Command, FedLine Direct, FedLine Web, Fedwire Funds, Fedwire Securities, and National Settlement.
The system is usually used to process more than $3tn every day.
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"Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error," the Fed said in a statement. "We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.”
The glitch is not thought to be due to a cyber attack.
"Let's work together to ensure we have a faster, more reliable way to send payments," Senator Cynthia Lummis said on Twitter.
Following the September 11 attacks, the Federal Reserve has taken a more active interest in maintaining the uptime of the financial system.
In 2003, it created an undisclosed list of the biggest and most influential financial institutions, which it told to beef up their data center redundancy.
The companies and organizations were told to ensure that primary and backup facilities were on different grid and water systems, and followed numerous other resiliency best practices.
In 2019, with much of the financial sector moving to the cloud - and in particular, moving to one cloud vendor - the Federal Reserve conducted a formal examination of an Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia.
The examination focused on Amazon’s resiliency and backup systems, and is thought to be the first of several visits to cloud facilities.
A single outage, caused by software or hardware issues, can still cripple key parts of the US economy.
In 2019, a fire at a Wells Fargo data center meant that customers could not access ATMs, or their online and mobile banking accounts.
