The Federal Reserve on Wednesday experienced a three-hour national outage on several of its payments systems, which disrupted the ability of financial institutions to send and receive funds with one another.
The Fed says the outage began at 11:15 a.m. ET. As of 2:17 p.m. ET, the Fed said the issue had been resolved and that users should have been able to resume normal access, although some services were still in the process of being restarted.
About 30 minutes later, the Fed said major services like Fedwire and the National Settlement Service had “resumed processing and are operating normally.”
“A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines,” said Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond spokesperson Jim Strader. “We are restoring services and are communicating with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations.”
Among the services affected: Fedwire, which allows banks with accounts at the Fed to send or receive payments, oftentimes used for “mission-critical” and same-day transactions.
Fedwire is a major rail for the U.S. financial system, and processed $840.5 trillion in transfers in 2020.
The National Settlement Service connects financial institutions with the Fed, which facilitates the transfer of central bank money within the financial system.
The outage comes as the Fed attempts to overhaul the payments system with its own real-time infrastructure called FedNow, which the central bank hopes to launch in 2023.
Brian Cheung is a reporter covering the Fed, economics, and banking for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter @bcheungz.
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