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Ken Tumin founded the Bank Deals Blog in 2005 and has been passionately covering the best deposit deals ever since. He is frequently referenced by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications as a top expert, but he is first and foremost a fellow deal seeker and member of the wonderful community of savers that frequents DepositAccounts.

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  2. Bank Websites Hit by Power Outage at Intuit Financial Services

Bank Websites Hit by Power Outage at Intuit Financial Services

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Bank Websites Hit by Power Outage at Intuit Financial Services

Many websites of banks and credit unions that are powered by Intuit Financial Services had outages in the last day. Hundreds of small banks and credit unions depend on Intuit Financial Services, a division of Intuit, to run their websites and online banking services. It used to be Digital Insight before Intuit acquired the company in 2007. It's one of the many companies that have been acquired by Intuit, the company famous for its Quicken and TurboTax software.

On November 9th we at DepositAccounts.com detected 65 banks and credit unions powered by Intuit Financial Services offline between 2:00pm and 9:00pm. I personally experienced a problem logging into one of my credit unions last night. I wasn't able to find any notice of this problem at the credit union's website, but I confirmed that its online banking is powered by Intuit.

It doesn't appear Intuit issued any kind of statement about this outage, but several of the banks did. Metropolitan National Bank in Arkansas had the most informative statement:

Metropolitan National Bank’s internet banking provider, Intuit Financial Services, experienced a power outage that is causing all internet banking products and services to be unavailable.

Power is now restored to their data center and they are working to restore internet banking as soon as possible.

Los Angeles Credit Union posted the following message on its Facebook page:

The LAFCU e-branch and website is currently down due to a power outage. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Sanford Institution for Savings in Maine also noted its outage on its Facebook page:

Our Online Banking and Cash Management system is offline due to a unexplained power outage at our online banking provider's data center. We hope to have this resolved soon.

I was able to log into my credit union account this morning so it appears Intuit fixed the problem. All account information was up-to-date.

There doesn't appear to be any data breach or data loss issue. So the main issue for customers is the loss of access to their accounts.

Bank website outages have become more common. Just last month Bank of America's website had problems for several days after news of its debit card fees came out.

One lesson for customers is to avoid waiting to the last minute for sending online bill payments or initiating online transfers. Website outages could force you to delay payments.

I would assume the banks and the companies that power their online banking have plenty of backup systems in place to prevent data loss. However, these outages don't help build confidence. How concerned are you? Do you print out transaction confirmation pages and your e-statements?

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7 Comments.
Anonymous
Anonymous   |     |   Comment #1
I, too, experienced an outage problem yesterday afternoon when I was trying to access my account at Flagstar Bank.  As Ken somewhat suggests, always print out documentation of any and all transactions in the remote event that all systems fail, including whatever backups are maintained.  (There are other reasons as well, especially if you move money around a lot.  Why?  In the event you are audited by the IRS because of their belief that you've failed to report all income.  Tracking and tracing money flows, should this occur, is imperitive.)

 

 
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jonintampa
jonintampa   |     |   Comment #2
I recently started using Intuit's Quicken for PC's online update (from banks and credit cards). I've noticed that it's 6 days behind on my ING Direct transactions, but isn't flagging an error.  I wonder if this is related to their power outage?
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Anonymous
Anonymous   |     |   Comment #3
You wrote:

" Do you print out transaction confirmation pages and your e-statements?"

I never print statements, however, I download and save them on a hard drive as reference and proof of the transactions in case I need to disapprove something.

 
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Anonymous
Anonymous   |     |   Comment #4
I experienced a similar problem yesterday and my credit union is Digital Credit Union.

I'm able to login today but no explaination was posted on the DCU web site.

Thanks for the useful info!

 
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Wil
Wil   |     |   Comment #5
I was unable to login to Discover's website today (I had received an email that my statement was ready and wanted to look at it).
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Anonymous
Anonymous   |     |   Comment #6
TurboTax (an Intuit product) was also down most of that day.  A message said it was for "Annual Maintenance." 
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Anonymous
Anonymous   |     |   Comment #7
The web front end of a bank is separate and independent from the backend database or mainframe of a bank. If the online access is down and both phone an in-branch reps can't help then you can begin to wonder about the realiability and functionality of the technical infrastructure.
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