Bank of America website Down But Bank Spokesperson Says It’s Not Wikileaks or Julian Assange

On Friday January 14, Bank of America’s online facility was down for most of the day.  According to the Twitter updates with the bofa hashtag, the outage happened at 8 in the morning.

Bank of America spokesperson Tara Burke spoke to CNN, however, and said that there was no need for panic, as they were aware of the problem which was simply due to a routine system change made the previous night.  Which of course only fuelled suspicions, as it sounds like the normal kind of PR untruth-speak that spokespeople are employed to deliver.   The bank issued an apology through it’s Twitter account, saying they were aware of the issue and were working to resolve it as fast as possible.

In January 2010 the bank had an outage similar to this one shortly after it paid off the $45 billion government bailout.  The bailout had imposed severe pay restrictions, and Bank of America was having trouble finding a new chief executive to replace Kenneth Lewis who was planning to retire at the end of the year.  As part of the original deal the bank was not allowed to repay the money until it was clear that it was stable and in good health again.

However, the money was raised, and it was back to business as usual.  Which was cause for concern in some quarters.  Whether or not the outage was related to the facilitation of business as usual hasn’t been established.

Yesterday the website either wouldn’t load at all or did so too slowly for customers to do business.  Of course some jumped to conclusions immediately that this was due to the bank being targeted by hacktivists, especially since Julian Assange said last year that he would be releasing documents in early 2011 which would reveal a large bank’s shady practises.

The purpose of this particular leak, he said, was to provoke a large scale investigation into the US banking system.  Many people have concluded that the bank he referred to is Bank of America, which announced in December last year that it would stop processing money transfers to WikiLeaks.  It won't do them any good if Assange can reveal underhanded dealings, but the truth of all that, and whether or not he was talking about BoA, is yet to be revealed.

In the meantime, Tara Burke said shortly after 2.30 that the outage wasn’t malware, nor did it have anything to do with WikiLeaks, and that it had only affected a small percentage of customers.  She would not elaborate further than to reiterate what had been said on BoA’s Twitter account and to add “unfortunately we had an issue”.  So it’s anybody’s guess.