In brief
- The Federal Reserve today said that its services were down.
- It isn’t certain yet what kind of effect this had on financial service providers.
- Does Bitcoin fix this?
The Federal Reserve today reported that its internal services went down, leading Bitcoin supporters to take to Twitter to recite variations of the oft-repeated refrain: “Bitcoin never goes down.” Ironically, however, a number of cryptocurrency exchanges also reported trouble getting money off their platforms due to the Fed outage.
According to the Fed’s service status page, a number of the central bank’s services went down, including Fedwire and FedACH (Automated Clearing House), which allow for funds to move between banks and customers. Banks handle trillions of dollars in transactions every day through the Fed; the outage meant US banks were unable to send or receive wires, with the movement of possibly billions of dollars delayed.
Despite the outage, it isn’t clear how big the impact on banks and customers has been.