bank of america

 
Bank Of America Website Down, 6 Hours And Counting

Bank of America’s website has been down most of the morning and there’s no sign of any progress towards restoring the site.

The bank is responding to users about the problem on Twitter via @BofA_Help. The website hasn’t been responding for about 6 hours for some users. A BofA spokeswoman has said the problems began for the bank’s website at 4 a.m. PST.

BofA says there is no timetable yet for when the website would be back to normal, but says the online banking outage affects “a small population of its customers.” The BofA spokesperson could not provide the number of customers currently affected. It also notes that the problems were not because of malware and customer information was not compromised.

Twitter has been buzzing about the BofA website failure. At least one Twitter user speculates about the possibility of the website being hacked by WikiLeaks’ advocates “Anonymous.”

    @DylanWest: Wondering if Bank of America is getting DOS attacks from pro Wikileaks hackers “Anonymous” again? Whatever it is… needs to end. Now. #bofa

Last year eBay’s, PayPal and Mastercard were faced with down websites after being targeted by groups supporting WikiLeaks. A Bank of America spokesperson told me its outage today is not the result of anything WikiLeaks related.

About 4 hours ago, @BofA_Help began addressing the load of complaints. The responses from  have been pretty standard so far. Most are along the lines of: “We are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as fast as possible. Please accept our apologies” and “Online Banking Outage: Bank of America is working to restore capability as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

That’s not stopping the stream of complaints from Twitter users. It’s payday for a lot of folks (well, those lucky enough to be employed these days) and many are probably trying to pay their bills online and check balances.

But while Bank of America’s website is suffering its stock is not. Shares are up over 2% today at $15.12, and up more than 6% this week. The bank will report fourth quarter earnings next Friday, January 21.