The Federal Reserve is investigating the second significant disruption in 2019 of a payments service administered by the U.S. central bank.
Certain bank transactions were delayed after
“The FedACH service, which processes transactions for commercial banks, is currently operating normally after experiencing delays in processing yesterday afternoon and early this morning,” Jean Tate, a spokeswoman at the Atlanta Fed, said in an emailed statement. “Some customers experienced delays in receiving confirmations of yesterday’s transactions. Federal Reserve technical staff continue to investigate the root cause of the issue.”
The Atlanta Fed
ACH is a national system that processes batches of electronic funds transfers such as payroll, social security benefits, tax refunds, corporate payments to vendors and utility payments,
Earlier on Thursday several banks, including Capital One, tweeted that they were experiencing issues.
“We’re monitoring the situation closely in partnership w/ the Fed,” Capital One tweeted. “As soon as they’ve resolved the issue we’ll work to make sure all transactions are posted as quickly as possible.”
A Fed
“Payment files and acknowledgments are flowing as of 7:40 a.m. on December 19,” it said. “Federal Reserve Bank technical staff continue to investigate the issue.”
Spokespersons at the Fed’s Washington headquarters didn’t immediately respond to request for comment on the issue.
This marks the second disruption to a Fed-run payments service this year. On April 1 the FedWire interbank funds transfer service went down for about three hours. The Fed blamed the outage on “an internal technical issue,” but declined to provide more details.
Bloomberg News sought additional information about that outage under the Freedom of Information Act, but the request and a subsequent appeal were denied by the Board of Governors.