JPMorgan Chase website outage linked to server, not cyber attack

Customers trying to use JPMorgan Chase’s website were frustrated again by four hours of disrupted service, but there was a twist this time: The outages were caused by a technical problem with the bank’s systems, not by a cyber attack.

The intermittent service disruptions began a little after 9 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. The New York-based bank advised customers to use its mobile banking services while it worked “to get things up to full speed.” The site was functioning well Tuesday.

The outage occurred three weeks after JPMorgan Chase’s website was knocked out by one in a series of denial-of-service attacks against banks. The cyber assaults choke online banking operations with so many phony requests that bank customers can’t use the online services.

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A Middle Eastern hacker group launched the attacks on U.S. banks in September, saying they would continue until a trailer for an amateur film disparaging Muslims is removed from YouTube.

A person who had been briefed on the latest outage, speaking on condition of anonymity out of security concerns, said a server problem, not a cyber attack, caused JPMorgan Chase’s latest outage.

The website sitedown.co, which logs customer reports of corporate website outages, recorded more than 200 comments on JPMorgan Chase’s website problem Monday.

The interrupted service follows a new wave of Internet attacks on financial firms. American Banker reported that American Express was hit Thursday by a cyber attack that left some customers unable to access their accounts. The trade newspaper said TD Bank as well as Wells Fargo Bank suffered similar attacks in the last two weeks.

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