Chase (Sort of) Addresses Downtime

If you have an account with Chase and you tried to access it online earlier this week, then you’re likely aware that their website suffered a major outage spanning parts of three days.

Well, the site is now back up, along with a brief apology:

To our customers:

Please accept our apology for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com.

Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us. This was not the level of service we know you expect.

Thank you for your patience and for the opportunity to work harder to serve you in the future.

Ummm, thanks. But that doesn’t really tell us anything.

According to a Chase spokesman, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune, the problem was reportedly caused by:

“a third-party database company’s software [which] caused a corruption of systems information, disabling our ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com. This resulted in a long recovery process.”

He went on to say that:

“[Chase] will work with customers to refund any fees that were incurred as a result of this problem.”

That’s all well and good, but an outage of this magnitude doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in their system. To be fair, any bank with a heavy reliance on the web access is potentially susceptible to this sort of thing. In fact, I’ve seen this sort of thing before.

Perhaps this is a good reason to maintain accounts at more than one bank. As you can see from our financial network map, our financial life has a number of built-in redundancies.

While we mostly maintain these accounts to give us a bit of flexibility when it comes to chasing higher interest rates, they also provide some protection against extended downtime at any one bank.