Chase online banking downtime misinformation continues

Website Chicago Breaking Business reports the following:

The online sites for Chase retail banking and credit card transactions are down due to technical problems, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase & Co. confirmed this morning. The problem began overnight, and the company is working to fix it, said spokesman Tom Kelly.

The bank urges customers to conduct their transactions at a branch or by phone, at 800-935-9935. A recording at that phone number tells callers to expect a long wait to speak with a banker.

In this little bit Chase has communicated about the outage, they are still not telling the truth.  It did not begin overnight.  It clearly began sometime yesterday morning or afternoon.

Update: 10:30 am PT:  A slightly different story has appeared on ABC News and while the story still claims the site has been down since last night, Chase’s spokesman is now quoted as saying:

The service has been down since Monday night, but bank spokesman Thomas Kelly couldn’t specify the exact time service was disrupted.

Does this mean they don’t know when it went down?

Update 9/15/10:  A comment on this story suggests that Chase had a scheduled maintenance window on Sunday.

Actually, they did have maintenance scheduled for Sunday Morning. Sunday afternoon and night site worked and crashed Monday evening before 4 pm or so, also noteworthy is that the site crashed last month as well, but made no news splash as the outage was mostly in the weekend. It did captured by a few websites that collect Chase gripes..

In all fairness to Chase, we have to entertain the possibility perhaps the maintenance message was up because of the close proximity to the maintenance window the day before if in fact there was one (you can’t believe everything you read).  Or not.  It is disturbing to hear that they might have had an outage last month as well.

Chase online banking downtime estimate now at 24 hours

I’m seeing more reports that put the outage starting earlier than our first reports.

According to this tweet, Chase was down at 7 am PT/10 am ET yesterday and this one puts it at around 2 pm PT/5pm ET yesterday.  Our best guesstimate then is that Chase has been down for up to 24 hours.

Update: 9:15 am PT/12:00 pm ET:  Just saw a tweet claiming Chase’s website has been down for three days.  While I don’t think it was down for everyone for three days, this might be an indication that they were having sporadic problems days before yesterday’s outage started.

Chase online banking down for 14 hours now

I’ve been updating the original post on this story regularly.  Here is an update for those of you following on RSS and Twitter.

Chase’s online banking has been down since around 4 pm PT/7pm ET yesterday, 14 hours so far.  Originally, they put up a message that they were down for scheduled maintenance but around 12:30 am PT/3:30 ET probably realized that was fairly unbelievable and changed the message on their main page to reflect the more unplanned nature of the outage. We have not received reports yet on whether this is affecting their other banking operations.

Stay tuned.

Chase online down again – UNSCHEDULED!

Chase online appears to be experiencing some unscheduled downtime again, despite what their website says.  I just received this from a reader:

9-13-2010  9:45 p.m (central time?)

Online Banking for Chase customers has been disrupted, again, for the second time in as many weeks.

This outage has been ongoing for well over two hours thus far.

No previous mention of this outage was posted on Chase.com’s main page and no e-mail was sent to Chase Online’s customer base informing them of any “scheduled maintenance.”

Interestingly, the notification message at https://chaseonline.chase.com has changed during this outage to try and classify this OUTAGE as “scheduled maintenance.”

Funny, you can only contact Chase’s online customer service by first LOGGING INTO YOUR ACCOUNT.  This activity is instantly greeted with the same “This website is temporarily unavailable” page.

I have e-mailed the editors over at The Wall Street Journal.  We’ll see if they decide to pick-up this story and run with it or if they let Chase’s flack tell them it was a planned outage for “system maintenance.”

How long will this Outage last?  Will this continue into normal business hours tomorrow?  How long will Chase customers be inconvenienced this time?  Does Chase care?  Do Chase’s shareholders care?

Stay tuned…

According to our reader, this started around 6 pm Pacific time on a weekday, a highly unlikely time for a scheduled maintenance.  Once again Chase is not giving us the straight story.

Update 11:50 pm. According to comments we’ve received, Chase was down as early as 4 pm, making this about an 8 hour unscheduled outage so far.  The image on Chase’s website (see above) claims this is due to “scheduled maintenance” but the image itself is called “defaultHomeOutageImage.gif”.  Looks like the Chase website developers are a little more honest than they should have been.