If you’re a Wells Fargo client you already know that one doozy of a bank outage happened last Thursday.
Those customers who wanted to use an ATM, buy something with a debit card or pay their bills online were left in limbo after a data-center fire knocked the nation’s third-largest bank off its pins.
Consumers were, understandably, more than a little ticked off.
Imagine needing gas to get to work but your debit card won’t function. How embarrassing to have to tell the babysitter you don’t have enough cash to pay in full.
The system was back up by late Thursday, although some users reported issues the next day. Among those issues was direct deposit of paychecks. Good times!
The bank promised to pay any Wells Fargo fees resulting from the outage. Whereupon one super-irate customer tweeted about an upcoming appointment to sign mortgage documents. Trouble was, at that moment the lender could not access the system to generate those documents.
“If I can’t close on my house and the seller defaults me, then what? U giving me my $45k earnest $ back?” the would-be buyer asked.
All in all, an unsettling situation, especially for paranoid dweebs like me. My initial thought was, “Data-center fire, huh? Or was it a trial run by hackers planning to bring down the country by bringing down the banks?”
I bet I’m not the only one who thought that.
