ACH Outage At U.S. Central Sends CUsScrambling

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - (04/07/04)–A bug in U.S Central’s ACHsoftware shut down all ACH transactions on Monday and most ofTuesday for the 2,200 credit unions the corporate serves.Unbeknownst to U.S. Central and its ACH software vendor, ACI, alimit on the number of batches a financial institution can processtriggered the disruption, according to Bob Amundson, SVP ofcorrespondent services at U.S. Central. "We have been successfullyrunning this software since 1998 and it was unknown to us and toACI that this limiter existed," he told The Credit Union Journal.The problem first showed up on Sunday when transactions from lateFriday were being processed in preparation for regular business onMonday. "We had a lot of batches, but the size of the files was nobigger than usual. But this bug in the software triggered thesystem to shutdown mid-process, and that corrupted the files fromFriday. When we brought the back-up online we discovered that dueto operator error, the backup was also corrupted. We spent all dayMonday and the first half of Tuesday on the recovery of data. Oncethe data was recovered, that allowed us to take corrective steps tobring the system back online." U.S. Central’s goal is to haveall the history files loaded and accessible this morning, thoughthere are some files that need to be recreated and may not beavailable until Friday.