Real-time payment and settlement systems owned and operated by the US Federal Reserve were reported to have been offline for part of Wednesday.
Due to these outages, many US banks and exchanges reported that they were unable to perform deposits or withdrawals through the Fed’s ACH system. Also, several cryptocurrency platforms tweeted that they were experiencing issues.
“We have been made aware of an outage with the FED that is affecting all FEDWIRE Funds and Fedwire Securities settlement services (https://www.frbservices.org/app/status/serviceStatus.do) – this means no incoming or outgoing USD wires are able to be processed at this time,” Coinbase said on its website.
Additionally, Kraken tweeted that “No ETA on resolution. Deposits and withdrawals are currently delayed. We will provide any updates as soon as possible.”
The Federal Reserve is down and this will impact all ACH and wire related activities on Binance US. For service updates, you can follow their service status here: https://t.co/k14lSL6IO7
— Binance.US ?? (@BinanceUS) February 24, 2021
However, it is not clear how many institutions were affected by this glitch, nor was the cause immediately apparent. But, no incoming or outgoing wires went through in the entire country as the outage affects almost all e-payment systems which went completely down. This included FedACH, FedCash, FedLine Command, FedLine Direct, FedLine Web, Fedwire Securities and National Settlement.
“Beginning around 11:15 a.m. ET, Federal Reserve Bank staff became aware of a disruption for all services. Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error,” the FED said on its status page.
The central bank said it was investigating a service disruption, which has since been resolved. It delayed transactions in its automated Clearing House (ACH) system. This marks the first significant disruption to a Fed-run Payments service in 2021.
Officials added in an update at 2:17 PM Eastern Time to confirm the issue had been resolved and to "apologize for the inconvenience and disruption this has caused to your operations."
The issue impacting payments service administered by the U.S. central bank has been resolved and users may resume normal access, the Fed added.
