Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Unidentified tech issues now resolved

Updated Some US customers using the Bank of America app to keep an eye on their accounts got a shock Wednesday morning when their checking and savings accounts were unexpectedly empty or out of date.

Complaints of wrong numbers in balances started pouring in at about 0930 PT (1630 UTC) on Downdetector, peaked at about 20,500 at 1020 PT, and are currently cruising at about 3,000 to 5,000 gripes every few minutes. The bank's website as well as mobile app seems to be affected, showing zero or just wrong values for accounts.

"It was fine earlier this morning," one punter said. "I went back in, it took forever to log-on, and then my balance was zero for both checking and savings which is wrong. Now it's showing my balance as of yesterday."

From Downdetector's outage map of complaints about Bank of America's online services, the errors seem concentrated in major cities, though that's likely simply due to population density.

Some of us here at Vulture West were affected by the glitch, with one staffer's checking account not registering a balance at all and another getting a warning notice, which you can see below.

Hopefully this will be sorted out faster than the bank's major service disruption in 2011, when its website went down for four days. That turned out to be an IT snafu, rather than a cyberattack, and it's likely the same is true in this case.

Bank of America had no comment at the time of going to press; we'll keep this story updated as necessary. ®

Updated to add at 1400 PT (2100 UTC)

Bank of America has assured us it has mostly fixed whatever the underlying problem was.

"Some clients are experiencing an issue accessing their accounts and balance information today," a spokesperson told The Register. "These issues are being addressed and have largely been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Updated to add at 2020 PT (0320 Thursday UTC)

Bank of America has confirmed the outage was a technical issue, not hacking.

"Some mobile and online banking clients experienced an issue accessing their accounts and balance information earlier today," a spokesperson told The Register. "These technology issues have been fully resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience."