Banks have largely recovered from a Fiserv outage on Friday that resulted in the loss of multiple money movement services, including peer-to-peer payments platform Zelle. But the loss of services reiterates the importance of contingency planning.
“On Friday morning, we experienced an internal issue that temporarily disrupted service. The issue was fully resolved Friday, and all impacted transactions have since been successfully processed,” a Fiserv spokesperson told American Banker.
Consumers were unable to send money through Zelle as a result of the outage, according to posts on DownDetector, a website that provides real-time monitoring and reporting of online service outages. ACH was also affected.
The disruption occurred during a planned “enhancement” to the network infrastructure at a Fiserv data center, the spokesperson said. “When the issue arose, our network team acted immediately to reverse the change and implement a series of phased, carefully coordinated actions to restore service. These efforts were carried out in close collaboration with our technology vendor partners. The impact was limited to financial institutions whose systems are connected to the affected data center.”
About 60 applications went down, which affected customers’ ability to move money externally, according to an executive from a regional bank, who requested anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters.
“Service started coming back up towards the second half of the day, but [it took] more than 12 hours to get the issue resolved on their side,” the executive said, noting that Fiserv provided updates every 15 minutes and larger communications every hour.