Bank of America Corp. says its online banking service has been restored to all of its customers.
The site was inaccessible for some users for most of the day Friday. The Charlotte, N.C., bank would not say exactly how many of its 29 million online banking customers were unable to access their accounts during the outage.
The problem appeared at around 7 a.m. EST, and was resolved at about 5:15 p.m., according to spokesperson Tara Murphy Burke. She said the majority of customers could access online banking during the day, but acknowledged that the system was slow for those who could get in.
Burke said the problem cropped up after a "routine systems change" overnight.
During the outage, a user received a message: "Error Occurred While Processing Request."
As news spread of the issue, traffic to the website increased and it became more difficult to access.
The bank's ATM network was operating normally, Burke said.
It's not the first time customers of the nation's largest bank have had trouble accessing their accounts. The site was down for about four hours on Aug. 27, and there was a similar outage about a year ago.
Other banks have had similar problems, including a problem at Chase.com in September that persisted for more than a day.
In December, Bank of America joined several other financial institutions in refusing to handle payments for WikiLeaks, the secret-releasing organization that is rumored to be preparing a release on the bank itself. The bank's actions followed similar moves by MasterCard Inc. and PayPal Inc. The bank's site did not show any impact from hackers at that time in response to its refusal.
