The computer failure suffered by the computer systems of the powerful American Central Bank (Fed) on Wednesday was due to human error linked to a maintenance error, according to a source close to the Fed.
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Maintenance operations carried out during the day, and not at night as is usually the case, disrupted some computer systems, the source said.
"
We determined that the origin (of the failure) was an internal operational error
," said the website of the banking services of the Fed.
“On
Wednesday February 24, several services of the Federal Reserve Bank were unavailable or severely limited for about four hours.
(...) All the services resumed their functioning at 4:00 p.m. (9:00 p.m. GMT)
”, it is specified.
Contacted by AFP, the Fed gave no further details.
In particular, commercial banks were prevented from making transfers to and from their accounts at the Fed for several hours.
The Federal Reserve, which is the bank for banks, has an account-to-account fund transfer system called FedACH.
Besides FedACH, other services, such as the coin distribution service (FedCash), were disrupted.
The Fed has extended the opening hours of services in order to carry out transactions that have been affected by the outage, a Fed spokesperson said Wednesday evening.
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These disruptions had raised questions in financial circles because a failure of the FedACH system can have a considerable impact because the system that manages employee payrolls, tax deductions and social security reimbursements, automatic monthly car loan payments and payments. different bills (electricity, water, gas).