Wells Fargo extends branch hours, staffing after customer account outage
BY BUSINESS RECORD STAFF
Wells Fargo is offering extended branch hours and additional staffing in contact centers to serve customers after a widespread mobile and online outage impacted customer banking on Thursday. All 5,500 Wells Fargo branches will extend their hours by one hour today and Saturday for branches that are open on Saturday. In a statement, Wells Fargo also said that transactions and balances that were not visible online or at ATMs early today were processed normally, and all transactions are visible to customers.
Thousands of customers nationally complained of an outage beginning Thursday morning, which was the second outage in the past week. Wells Fargo attributed Thursday's outage to an automatic power shutdown at one of the company's main data center facilities, which was "triggered by a smoke condition" created by routine maintenance, the statement said.
"In response to the power shutdown, applications were systematically re-routed to back-up data centers throughout the day yesterday. By end of day, most critical systems had been recovered, and Wells Fargo continues to restore services across all business and operational areas," the statement said.
"While we restored operations throughout the day and continue to address customer concerns, our recovery from these issues was not as rapid as we or our customers would have expected. We will review the system issues in detail, and do all we can to ensure that this type of disruption doesn't happen again," Wells Fargo CEO and President Tim Sloan said.
Wells Fargo is normally open 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. on Fridays, and select locations are normally open 9 a.m.-12 p.m. on Saturdays.