Some US customers using the Bank of America app to keep an eye on their accounts got a shock Wednesday morning when their checking and savings accounts were unexpectedly empty or out of date.
Complaints of wrong numbers in balances started pouring in at about 0930 PT (1630 UTC) on Downdetector, peaked at about 20,500 at 1020 PT, and are currently cruising at about 3,000 to 5,000 gripes every few minutes. The bank's website as well as mobile app seems to be affected, showing zero or just wrong values for accounts.
"It was fine earlier this morning," one punter said. "I went back in, it took forever to log-on, and then my balance was zero for both checking and savings which is wrong. Now it's showing my balance as of yesterday."
From Downdetector's outage map of complaints about Bank of America's online services, the errors seem concentrated in major cities, though that's likely simply due to population density.
Where's my money??! ... Downdetector's hot-spot map of reported errors with Bank of America balances
Some of us here at Vulture West were affected by the glitch, with one staffer's checking account not registering a balance at all and another getting a warning notice, which you can see below.
Oh, that's not looking good ... A BoA error today saying accounts cannot be retrieved at this time
Hopefully this will be sorted out faster than the bank's major service disruption in 2011, when its website went down for four days. That turned out to be an IT snafu, rather than a cyberattack, and it's likely the same is true in this case.
Bank of America had no comment at the time of going to press; we'll keep this story updated as necessary. ®