Brokerages, Banks Caught Up in Massive Tech Outage

What You Need to Know

Clients at Bank of America, JPMorgan, Schwab and Wells Fargo reported problems, according to Downdetector.
Downdetector reported no major issues at Vanguard or Fidelity as of mid-morning Eastern time.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said it is working with impacted customers to resolve the matter.

Clients of financial services companies couldn’t log into their accounts Friday as technology outages hit operations at businesses worldwide.

The issues are tied to a software update by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, causing computers operating on Microsoft’s Windows system to crash, according to multiple news outlets such as the Associated Press. At the same time, a widespread outage of the cloud computing service Microsoft Azure affected Windows PCs, a report from Data Center Dynamics explained.

The result: global service disruptions for financial institutions, as well as airlines, hospitals, ports and media sites around the world. 

In the U.S., clients at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab, TD Bank, Wells Fargo, Visa, U.S. Bank and Square reported problems, as well as users of payroll company ADP, among others, according to outage monitoring site Downdetector.

Downdetector reported no major issues at Vanguard or Fidelity as of mid-morning Eastern time.

A message on the Charles Schwab website and its account on X, formerly Twitter, read: “Due to a third-party, global, industrywide issue, certain online functionality may be intermittently slow or unavailable. We’re actively monitoring the issue. Phone services may be disrupted and hold times may be longer than usual.”