Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Capital One is still battling to fix whatever brought down its systems on Wednesday, which has left people unable to access their money.

While the US banking and credit-card giant continues to accept incoming deposits, attempts to withdraw funds or look up accounts bring up errors or restrictions, customers have complained. Capital One attributed the problem to a technical issue caused by a third-party provider, without naming the vendor.

“We are experiencing a technical issue with a third-party vendor that is temporarily impacting some account services, deposits, and payment processing for portions of our consumer, small business, and commercial bank,” C-One said on Thursday.

“We’re working closely with our provider to resolve this issue and restore processing as quickly as possible. We expect services to gradually begin to return to normal throughout today and the majority of issues to be resolved by tomorrow morning.”

It’s now Friday, and work is still ongoing to address the IT breakdown, with accounts not showing the correct balances and withdrawals not working as expected. The corporation said it would cover “all reasonable fees incurred as a result of this incident once we are restored.”

No resolution in sight … Graph showing number of complaints from users over the past day on Downdetector that Capital One’s service isn’t working

The bank had no comment at the time of publication other than its social media posts asking for patience as it continues to rectify the problem. Indeed, according to Downdetector, the situation appears to be getting worse, with more and more complaints coming in. Customers are understandably peeved.

“Do we have an ETA? I have to feed my son and I can’t without getting access to my money,” one said on social media. Capital One’s response was, “We are actively working to resolve the issue and restore all services, and apologize for the inconvenience” – a line that gets repeated a lot.

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It’s been a bad week for Capital One. On Tuesday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a lawsuit against the bank, alleging [PDF] it “illegally avoided paying billions in interest to millions of consumers who held its flagship ‘high interest’ savings account, 360 Savings,” by setting up confusing products.

“The CFPB is suing Capital One for cheating families out of billions of dollars on their savings accounts,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “Banks should not be baiting people with promises they can’t live up to.”

In response, Capital One said it strongly disagreed with the CFPB’s claims, indicating plans to vigorously defend itself in court.

We’ll update this story as new information becomes available. ®