Customers of Chase Manhattan Bank had problems logging on to its Web site and paying bills last week, a spokesman confirmed.
But by Friday morning the bank had completed upgrading its server capacity by 33%, resolving many of the problems, the spokesman said.
Demand for Web banking increased at Chase because some dial-up PC banking customers failed to switch to year-2000-compliant software by a July 20 cutoff date, a customer service representative said. Instead those customers began trying to bank over the Internet.
Steps Chase had initiated to increase the capacity of its servers were unrelated to the year-2000 issue, the bank spokesman said.
"We're taking this very seriously," he said. "We're accelerating a lot of upgrades that were planned and making sure that vendors know this is of utmost priority."