The web site for JPMorgan Chase, the second-largest bank in the United States, has been down since 11:00 PM EDT 13 September. Chase's customer service department, contacted at noon on the 14th, expected the outage to continue for a few more hours, but it was still down at 5:00 PM.
The outage affects all customers, both businesses and consumers, and all online transactions, such as making a mortgage payment, managing investments, or just checking an account balance. Tom Kelly, a Chase spokesperson, declined to estimate the number of customers affected "for competitive reasons."
Customers receive an error message, "This website is temporarily unavailable." No alternative is offered, but determined Web users will probably find Chase's "Contact Us" page, which contains a long list of phone numbers for Chase's myriad banking services. Kelly noted that customers can still go to a physical branch as well.
UPDATE (15 Sepetember 2010):
This Chicago Tribune report time dated at 0934 says that Chase Bank's online banking web site was back up early this morning. However, it also reports that some customers are still complaining that they cannot access their accounts (see comments below).
The story states that:
"A Chase spokesman said the site was restored shortly after midnight Chicago time. It went down Monday night leaving customers of Chicago’s biggest bank without access to account information or the ability to pay bills online. ATMs and telephone banking were working. Chase has 16.5 million customers who use its online services."
According to this Bloomberg BusinessWeek story at 1043, the bank "will refund late fees and help fix other problems customers encountered."
The story also says that "More than 3.7 million households use JPMorgan’s online web site to pay their bills."
There is still no definitive word on what caused the outage.
UPDATE (17 September 2010)
Apparently, the problem has now been fixed. There are no news reports of customer problems with the web site that seem to be appearing.
According to this story at the Wall Street Journal yesterday,
"The bank late Wednesday offered its most detailed explanation for the outage: that a third party vendor's database software corrupted the log-in process. The bank said no customer data was at risk and all other methods of banking, by telephone or ATMs, performed well."
The bank said everything was working well, but yesterday, a WSJ blog post said that people were still complaining about problems they were having.
