Bank of America glitch that stressed customers coast-to-coast is resolved

A glitch with Bank of America’s mobile and online services on Wednesday prevented thousands of customers from accessing their accounts or discovering they had a zero balance, according to company officials and an outage monitoring website.

The nationwide issue began in the morning and affected more than 20,000 customers before the company said it was fully resolved Wednesday evening. Some customers were livid that Bank of America had not alerted them about the issue and that they were getting little assistance from customer care. They turned to the social media platform X to air their grievances.

“Bank of America at least give customers some updates on why bofa is down?” wrote Asim Khan.

“Yes, obviously this is a widespread issue with BOFA, possibly system-wide, so please stop with the individual ‘send a private message’ canned response. Not cool to leave people hanging and feeling insecure about their money,” wrote another user.

“Horrible. I’m definitely looking for another bank. Can not log in to my online banking to pay for my food that I’m currently in line to pay. I’ve been in hold going on a hour and nothing. Horrible customer service,” another wrote.

Matthew Card, a spokesman for the company, said in a written statement that some mobile and online banking clients had experienced an issue accessing their accounts and balance information.

“These technology issues have been fully resolved,” he wrote in another statement released Wednesday evening. “We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Card did not say how widespread the issue was or the number of customers affected by the outage but said the glitch was not related to a cyberattack.

According to Downdetector, customers began reporting the issue around 9 a.m. Pacific time. The reports came from several major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, New York and Boston. Many people on the site reported having problems accessing their accounts online, on mobile devices and in some cases at ATMs, which charged accounts for money the machines didn’t dispense.

Bank of America has 8.3 million digital clients in California with 2.2 million in Los Angeles, according to the company’s website.

Customers on social media reported having trouble logging into their accounts or receiving error messages that their accounts could not be retrieved and that their current balance amount was unavailable. Some customers saw no balance — just dashes — while others received a message that the balance being displayed was from the previous day.

It’s not the first time people with Bank of America have logged into their accounts to find money missing. More than a year ago, customers took to social media to complain about money missing from deposits and Zelle transactions.

The glitch comes two days after many in the nation were affected by another digital outage, when Verizon experienced a nationwide service outage that prevented customers from placing calls or sending and receiving texts. Services have since been restored.