WASHINGTON — Wells Fargo said Wednesday afternoon that it has fixed the issued that led to customers not being able to access their online banking, just as tens of millions of stimulus checks were expected to be added to accounts.
"We apologize for the issue we had with our online banking earlier today. Our technical teams have resolved the issue and you should now be able to access online banking again," Wells Fargo tweeted shortly after 2 p.m. Eastern.
The company said the issues were "due to high volumes."
The outage Wednesday morning occurred on the first official payment date for customers to receive the third round of stimulus checks from the American Rescue Plan. While the federal government announced last week that it had started processing and distributing the first wave of payments, several banks, including Wells Fargo, had told customers the money wouldn't be available until Wednesday.
"We know the importance of the stimulus funds to our customers, and Wells Fargo is making the stimulus funds available immediately when they are made available to us," Wells Fargo said in a statement on Tuesday. "The U.S. Treasury has indicated that payments will be distributed in multiple phases and could take several weeks to distribute, so not everyone will receive payments at the same time. March 17, 2021 is the first official payment date for eligible customers to receive a direct deposit of their stimulus payment, and customers may see a direct deposit as early as that morning."
The Washington Post reported that the IRS informed financial institutions to expect roughly 90 million direct deposits amounting to $242.2 billion on March 17, according to a banking industry group.
The latest round of relief payments will provide households with $1,400 for each adult, child and adult dependent, such as college students or elderly relatives. Adult dependents were not eligible to receive payments in the previous two rounds of payments.
The payments start declining for an individual once adjusted gross income exceeds $75,000 and go to zero once income hits $80,000. The payment starts declining for married couples when income exceeds $150,000 and goes to zero at $160,000.
Over the weekend, the IRS re-launched the “Get My Payment” tool on the IRS.gov website to help Americas track their own payments.
Twitter users Wednesday morning reacted to the banking outage.