(Natural News)—Last week, a number of American banks could not process payments for a few days, leaving some customers in a precarious financial situation as transfers and deposits failed and highlighting the risks of relying on electronic banking.
The effects of the outages were far-reaching. Many people’s payroll direct deposits failed, leaving them unable to access the money they earned. ACH payments also failed to process, which resulted in late fees. There were also duplicated withdrawals, which left many customers in a bind after their money was taken out twice for a single transaction. Between Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America, there were almost a million failed transactions in total.
A precise cause has not been disclosed, but the problem is almost certainly in the backbone of the banking system itself because people experiencing issues were unable to resolve them by going to their local branches.
The Clearing House Payments Company reported that instructions for transactions were sent to the affected banks “with the account number and names of customers masked” because of a processing error. This data is needed to process incoming payments and post funds to…
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