Wells Fargo CEO apologizes after mobile banking, ATM disruption

Feb. 8, 2019

Updated at 7:50 p.m. EST

Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan issued an apology and offered to extend banking hours after a smoke condition and power outage damaged the lender's digital banking operations, ATM machines and temporarily halted credit card payments.

Wells Fargo officials said a smoke condition at a data center on Thursday led to an automatic power shutdown, following what it called a routine maintenance operation, according to the announcement. The bank acknowledged that customers were unable to see payroll deposits and account balances on the mobile and online banking systems and at ATM machines, however, they said the deposits were processed in the background.

Officials said the problems were corrected, but warned that some customers may still not be able to see their balances online. Consumer credit card balances and mortgage balances may not be visible online as well.

"I apologize to our customers and team members for the inconvenience caused by yesterday's system issues," Sloan said in the announcement. "While we restored operations throughout the day and continue to address customer concerns, our recovery from those issues was not as rapid as we or our customers would have expected."

He said the bank would review the system issues in detail to make sure they don't happen again. He added that customer service representatives would be available to help customers in branches and on the phone 24 hours a day.

In addition, bank branches would be open an additional hour today and Saturday, Feb. 9, in situations where the branches normally have Saturday hours.

The bank said it would refund any fees incurred as a result of the outage as well.

The San Francisco-based bank operates in 5,500 branch locations and has 13,000 ATM machines. The bank has 29.2 million active mobile and online banking customers.

Topics: Mobile Banking

Companies: Wells Fargo & Co

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