B of A Denies Attacks Behind Web Outages But Mum on Cause

On its sixth day of intermittent website outages that began on Friday, Bank of America acknowledged its website troubles, but would not say why. "Online banking systems are available to customers," says spokeswoman Tara Burke. "We are rigorously monitoring the online banking space and we chose to continue to deploy the alternative home page you're seeing to ensure our customers get to the right destination quickly."

Although Burke says the site "is largely operating normally," for most of the day Wednesday it didn't look like it was. Instead of the polished graphics and numerous links to products and services the bank usually features on its home page, there was a plain white page with small logo and the message, "We value your business and appreciate your continued patience. Most of our site is working normally, but you may experience occasional delays." The home page offered four options: continue to online banking, find a banking center or ATM, visit the sitemap for more products and services, or contact the bank to speak with a representative. Late in the day Wednesday, the alternative page had been replaced with the bank's normal home page.

The bank has 29 million online customers, some of whom have been vocal in venting their frustration over social media. One customer Tweeted, "Your website never works properly and now you what [sic] stick to people with less than $20,000 in their accounts." Another wrote, "Online banking is still acting up. Six days now! How do they expect me to do my banking business?"

"Online banking is available to customers, that's all we're going to say," Burke says.

Bank of America's outage immediately raised red flags because it occurred a day after the bank infamously announced a $5 monthly debit card fee and about two weeks into the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City's financial district. Many observers speculated that the bank was a victim of a denial-of-service attack from hackers upset about the bank's new fees. In a denial-of-service attack, attackers overwhelm a website's servers by flooding them with requests, making the websites unreachable or unresponsive. Another possibility is that without any criminal intent, the bank simply had more website visitors than it could accommodate. A third possibility is that a systems upgrade could have caused the glitches to occur.

Burke would not say why the site has been malfunctioning. "We don't break out the root cause," she says. "You're going to ask about denial of service. Every indication is that recent performance issues have not been a result of hacking, malware or denial of services."

Bank website outages are not uncommon. Last September, Chase had an outage that froze retail and small business online banking for three days in what the bank called a technical glitch. Much later, insiders shared, off the record, that the bank was overhauling its customer databases and that that extra work had overtaxed the web servers.

But a six-day outage is highly unusual. Burke suggests that beyond the initial inconvenience of not being able to take care of their banking the past several days, customers have no reason for concern. "If customers are worried they shouldn't be, customer information is safe," she says.