Chase.com – Major Outage or “Scheduled Maintenance?”
Chase appears to be in the middle of a massive outage affecting millions of online banking customers. Reports of the outage started to surface yesterday evening, and as of 4:00pm ET today, the site is still down. Chase’s website indicates that the site is down due to “scheduled system maintenance.” Huh? I can’t say I know of a single bank that conducts system maintenance in the middle of the day, let alone for an extended amount of time!
Chase hasn’t released any details as to what the issue is here. There is speculation that there has been a security breach, but for the moment that is nothing but speculation so I won’t address that unless the bank indicates otherwise. One thing is for sure – this isn’t scheduled system maintenance.
According to news reports it appears that the branches, phones, and ATMs are operating just fine. Basically this is one major headache for Chase customers who rely on this self-service channel. Many customers will incur fees resulting from late bill payments. This is something the bank will have to address with customers and is clearly a huge inconvenience for customers. Customers don’t necessarily care what caused the breach (unless it is security related), they care about being able to have easy access to their accounts.
The bank should be using social media to give customers a better idea of what is going on. The Twittersphere is ablaze with comments about the outage. Chase should be embracing social channels and stop hiding behind the “scheduled system maintenance” tagline. The bank should be using social channels and its website to at least direct customers to channels that are alive and well.
EDIT 9/15 at 10:00am ET. Service appears to have been restored.
EDIT 9/15 12:15pm ET. The site is down again.
Someone wryly theorized that this was part of a viral marketing stunt to drive awareness of branches and tellers. Funny.
Actually, they did have maintenance scheduled for Sunday Morning. Sunday afternoon and night site worked and crashed Monday evening before 4 pm or so, also noteworthy is that the site crashed last month as well, but made no news splash as the outage was mostly in the weekend. It did captured by a few websites that collect Chase gripes..
So, it is unlikely that this is an attack. if it is one, it was a prolonged attack. It is more likely that they crashed and corrupted databases, in which case, they are restoring from tape, and will likely have to validate many things. That sort of suggests that we might see it come back up sometime tomorrow afternoon, or later if the restore fails and they have to revert to a different backup.
Jeffry, you are too funny. Yes, it must have been a viral marketing stunt : )
SRC, good comments, thank you. Even if this was in fact scheduled maintenance, it definitely wasn’t scheduled to run for this extended period. Better communication is required between the bank and its customers.
11am EST and it crashed and burned again.
That idea is not that crazy. When I went to the branch to use the ATM, a Chase employee came out and told me I could go to a teller if I needed help. They have NEVER done that before. There were no customers inside the bank only very annoyed ones at the ATM. My conclusion is that what you said is right on target!
The site is letting me log in but after I enter username and password it tells me that it can’t complete my request. I was not sure what was happening so I tried to reset my password which worked in that I went through all the motions of doing that but again it won’t let me in. This is a bit worrying….
Chase online banking is horribly unreliable. This is not the first time that Chase has suffered a lengthy outage of its online banking system. For example, Chase online banking was down for 15 hours on August 7 through August 8. This article on the USA Today web site mentions that August outage:
JPMorgan Chase’s Online Banking Outage Sparks Questions:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/09/investigators-seek-specific-trigger-to-jpmorgan-chases-online-banking-outage/1
If that URL does not work, Google the article’s headline:
“JPMorgan Chase’s Online Banking Outage Sparks Questions”
Their site is down again now, with the same bogus “scheduled maintenance” notice! (Actually they have a typo: it says “mainenance”)
I was not notified to expect any scheduled system maintenance, and I need to use the site NOW to pay a bill… This is extremely inconvenient for me as a Chase customer!
I wish they would at least communicate with us to let us know what time to expect the site to be up and running again.