Report: Chase Snafu Slowed $132M in Transfers

Last week we noted an outage for the Chase.com online banking portal, which was inaccessible for much of Tuesday and Wednesday. The company said its web site crashed Monday evening when a third party vendor’s database software corrupted the log-in process.

There's been no official incident report offering details of the outage, but database industry analyst Curt Monash has an interesting unofficial account. After writing about the incident last week, Monash was contacted by "a credible source close to the situation" that provided additional information about what went wrong. According to this source, a bug caused corruption in a Oracle database that housed customer profiles, and about $132 million in ACH transfers were held up by the database outage.

Chase acknowledged that scheduled bill payments were delayed, but said any payments originally scheduled for September 13, 14 or 15 were processed Wednesday night, September 15. Chase said it would refund any late fees that result from the outage.

As with all anonymously sourced reports, take this with a grain of salt. See Monash's DBMS2 blog for details.