NEW ORLEANS — While banks, both large and regional, have largely stayed silent about the impacts of Thursday night’s Crowdstrike outage, many customers reported Friday that they were unable to access certain services.
The outage was first reported Thursday night. It was traced to a cybersecurity update on Microsoft’s system and caused computers to go down worldwide.
J.P. Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the U.S. A company media representative said Friday that he did not have any information on any impacts of the outage that he was able to offer.
WWL Louisiana asked people leaving the Chase bank branch on St. Charles Avenue whether they had experienced problems. Many said they had, and that they were told it was due to computer problems from the outage.
“I couldn’t access anything through the teller,” said Jacob Rodriguez, who came to the branch to try and open an account. He said he was told “the bank was unable to open a new account due to the system bug from the night before.”
Alan Minor said he was not able to withdraw the amount that he wanted because “the system was down.” He said he would have to “pay maybe half of my bill rather than all of it, and I have to come back later.”
On Twitter, the bank Charles Schwab said that “due to a third-party, global, industry-wide issue, certain online functionality may be intermittently slow or unavailable. We’re actively monitoring the issue.”
Besides that, most banks appear not to have addressed the issue on social media. However, the website DownDetector which tracks outages at major companies shows major spikes in service problem reports from last night to this morning at Chase and Bank of America, the country’s second-largest bank.
If you find yourself unable to access your account, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recommends you try contacting your bank’s customer service department, either over the phone or on social media.
Once the outage is over, it adds that you should check your account to make sure you were not charged any fees you could not have avoided. You may be able to get them waived quickly.
Of course, all of that will be difficult with the weekend beginning, making the timing of the outage unfortunate. “You’ve got bills to pay, you’ve got kids to feed, you’ve got a lot of things to do on Friday,” said Minor. “Friday’s not just happy hour.”
WWL Louisiana also reached out to the largest regional banks in the Gulf South area. The only one to respond, Home Bank, said it was no longer experiencing problems from the outage.
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