Bank of America’s homepage was down Friday morning, a day after the megabank announced that it will begin charging customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. Instead of the bank’s normal site, visitors receive a notice stating “Home Page Temporarily Unavailable,” followed by the message, “We’re sorry, but some of our pages are temporarily unavailable.”
The site indicates that the bank’s online banking system is still working, but a number of commenters to Credit.com’s website say that it is not. When users attempt to log in to an account, they see the following screen:
From this screen, they again have option to click on a link labeled, “Continue to Online Banking,” but upon doing that, users are shown a screen with the following text: “Error 404: SRVE0190E: File not found: /$clickthru”
Other services, including looking up an ATM or a branch, appear to be operational.
Two spokespeople with the bank did not immediately respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. It’s possible that the website became overwhelmed by so many Bank of America customers and others seeking information about the bank’s debit fee plan, but there’s no indication yet about whether the website failure is related to yesterday’s announcement.
Update (11:35 AM EST): The Bank of America homepage is now back up, however, access to accounts is still not available.
Update (11:58 AM EST): Credit.com was contacted by Bank of America spokeswoman Tara Burke. She told us the following:
“Bank of America.com was having some issues this morning. There were access issues for some customers. Some customers were able to bank online, some experienced access issues. But our text, mobile, ATM and banking centers, no impact there. This was not any compromise to customer information. It was not related to hacking. It has no correlation to the announcement yesterday. ”
When we asked why the service interruption occurred, she said, ”We don’t break out the details of each incident.”
We are still unable to access Bank of America’s online banking portal.
Update (12:20 PM EST): We eventually made it to a login screen after clicking through several error pages, however, when we entered our credentials, we got the following message, “For security purposes, your Countrywide passcode was disabled. You will need to reset your passcode below.” However, no passcode reset tool is present.
Bank of America, Countrywide, Error Message
Bank of America purchased Countrywide, a mortgage company, in 2008 for $4 billion. Many have since been critical of the deal.
Update (2:50 PM EST): Bank of America’s homepage is down again.
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Christopher Maag Contributing writer for Credit.com, Chris graduated with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and has reported for a number of publications including The New York Times, TIME magazine and Popular Mechanics. Have a question for our experts? Email them at CreditExperts@Credit.com.
{ 35 comments… add a comment }
Tried to sign in to my account and could not access at all. They have become too big and arrogant NOT to fail.
I encourage people to bank elsewhere.
Agreed!!!!
We have a lot of money in BOA and plan to pull it this weekend. Going to PNC where they have low fees no ATM fees, and like their clients.
Online banking is not working for me despite what the article says.
I receive this error: Error 404: SRVE0190E: File not found: /$$clickthru
Online banking not working for me either. I try to sign in, it says that online banking is working slower than normal, and then if I try to “continue to online banking”, I get the same error message as M. I really don’t like this bank.
They’ve partially restored their home page, but I still can’t access my accounts. Always results in a server error.
I learned that if you click on the actual Continue Online Banking button (rather than the hyperlink they provide) it works. Just be a little patient, cross your fingers, and don’t try to access the wire transfer section.
Thank you for the instruction……worked for me!!!!
Thank you all for your updates!
Mobile banking on iPhone also cludgy. Can get balances, but when a single account detail requested, get message that mobile banking currently unavailable.
Last day of the month and quarter … bad day to go down, Bank of America! I was finally able to sign in to online banking, but then was taken back to “homepage unavailable” message. Hope they logged me out … and didn’t charge me a fee for it!
Don’t they make money from merchants on the Debit card transactions to begin with? Why charge $5 a month? With all their dumb decisions piling up on each other, it’s no wonder their stock price is in the toilet.
The new $5.00 fee is becasue the banking reform law has drastically restricted how much they can charge merchants for accepting debit cards. It used to be as high as 2.5% of the transaction, but now is limited by law to around 1%, or $0.43, whichever is lower.
This is a crappy way to recover the money, een though they pretty much don’t have a choice. If they were to just “eat the costs” of the reduced fees, they would find themselves liable in a SEC filing with the potential for a massive shareholder lawsuit. Business ethics and SEC regulations pretty much require them to attempt to recover lost “income’.
All the same, I can’t really afford to give them $60 a year in debit fees, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. I suppose I am going to be one of those people who switches banks, too.
You are a real tool. Bank of America has a choice. Debit cards are still profitable: it costs them about 2 cents to process a transaction versus they make 21 cents on it (that’s about 19 cents profit).
Shareholder lawsuits are a joke. Stock is “caveat emptor”: buyer beware.
WTF!!
Can’t understand how come they pull the page down on 30th of month.. today is my pay date and want to transfer my funds, pay bills…
Will BOA pay me anything ? I dont want simple apology from banks who already gobbled lots of tax$$
I couldn’t get to my account so tried to access online bill pay but was told I don’t have an account there now that allows me to use that feature!! This happens shortly after they announce they’re firing 30,000 employees. Hmmm. Industrial sabotage from within? I’ve been with BA for 32 years, but looks like it’s time to jump from this sinking ship.
What’s more ridiculous… trying to tie the article on $5 Debit Card fees to the BofA site going down or the negative comments that are posted on the topic. Honestly if you think that their website went down because of web traffic you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. And if you can’t afford to pay $5 per month (not per transaction) you shouldn’t be allowed to have a checking account at any financial institution. In order for any bank (not credit union) to stay profitable within this segment of business they will ALL have to adopt some level of fee structure for the debit card market. How about some intelligent comments rather than idiotic ramblings from both the writer of the article and the readers.
Thats funny. Boo hoo, the banks won’t make $10 Billion a year in profit, only $8 Billion…how sad. It is not unreasonable to believe that the banks can absorb those fee reductions and lower their gross profit margins and still have a healthy return on their (shareholders) investments. The banks are greedy bastards who do not want to live in the belt-tightening world we all live in and and instead want to enjoy the stratospheric profits they experienced prior to 2008. It’s because they all operate in unison regardless if it’s collusion or not…one raises fees they all do.
Actually, it going down to traffic/velocity is likely. It’s a payday and the fee news has generated a lot of interest from current customers. But more importantly at this point, load testing it on the way back up to open it to production is causing issues. It took a while to stay stable in their early March event when they came back up. Still down at 4:48pm edt.
Wow…the shills aren’t very hard to spot here, are they?
The site is still down here in MD. Trying to pay mortgage for tomorrow but no luck all day. I am out of this bank with my mulah. Bastards!!
Still no access to my online banking! ughhhh
Not working here in Southern California either! I’ve been trying for the last 6 hours. This is absolutely ridiculous and wonder if we can charge BofA $5 for every hour they are down.
Nice one!!!
7:50 pm (eastern) and still no access to olnine BIOA accounts — so how long will we, the average American consumer, take this nonsense?
9-30-11 7:09 PM PST bankofamerica.com is still down.
this is just not good. I didn’t like b of a before but this just is unacceptable. I hope they go bankrupt
It’s 12:56 AM ET and the Bank of America website is STILL DOWN in Georgia. I have been trying since this morning to check my account. This is pathetic.
Still down after the main page comes up, can’t get anywhere from there. It is 10 pm PACIFIC TIME.
I searched their site and there are no signs of any fees.
it’s 1:34 am and I’m still getting error and I really need to do some online banking before tomm am. I hope they will reimburse me if my check bounces..
Site down as of 945 am Oct 1, 2011. Day 2. Can’t pay bills… If late payment charges incurred will BOA make amends? Doubtful
I’ve been trying all day (SA, 10/1) and still can’t get to online banking. I get to the point where I enter my password and it just sits there, then I eventually get an error message. Had the same issue last night.
Have any of the usual DDOS suspects claimed or denied responsibility?
The fact that someone got a “Countrywide password change” notice suggests a security breach in addition to a DDOS.
And it still isn’t working well!