The US Federal Reserve payment system has been restored on Wednesday afternoon after an outage on multiple services that occurred at 12:43 PM ET (17:43 GMT), Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond spokesman Jim Strader told Sputnik.
"Services are restored," Strader said Wednesday afternoon.
The Federal Reserve Bank staff has launched an investigation into the disruption of services.
Among the impacted services were Account Services, Check 21, Check Adjustments, FedACH, FedCash, FedLine Advantage, FedLine Command, FedLine Direct, FedLine Web, Fedwire Funds, Fedwire Securities, and National Settlement.
Issues with the Central Bank, according to the Fed, have been resolved first, and "users may resume normal access", while other services remained shut down. At 2:30 PM ET (19:30 GMT), the Fed said that access to FedCash Services via the FedLine Web solution had also been restored.
Shortly after, it was announced that access to several other services had been resumed.
"The Fedwire Funds Service, Fedwire Securities Service, and National Settlement Service have resumed processing and are operating normally. The Federal Reserve Banks have taken steps to help ensure the resilience of the Fedwire and NSS applications, including recovery to the point of failure", the Fed said.
According to the statement, the reason behind the outage was "a Federal Reserve operational error".
"We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue", the Fed said.
Digital cryptocurrency exchange platform OKCoin announced that due to Federal Reserve service outages its customers may experience "delays for USD deposits and withdrawals into and out" on the platform until issues are resolved.
The Federal Reserve system handles essential financial transactions such as direct payroll deposits, Social Security, income tax refunds, auto payments for mortages, utility bills and other operations.
According to reports, disruptions in the federal transaction system have not happened for "decades."