Is zelle down? JPMorgan Chase Zelle Outage
A disruption at JPMorgan Chase affected Zelle transactions on Tuesday, leading to user complaints that persisted into the following day. The repercussions for Zelle and its affiliated banks may extend for an extended period.
This marks the second Zelle malfunction within six months associated with a bank connected to Early Warning Services, the owner of the P2P app.
The recent disruption at JPMorgan Chase follows a similar outage at Bank of America in January, both of which are among the seven co-owners of Early Warning.
Issues frequently arise when digital payments pass through outdated core banking platforms.
This challenge may escalate with the increase in transactions conducted on networks linked with The Clearing House's RTP network and the Federal Reserve's real-time processing system FedNow.
“Instant is great when it works. But when it's broken, we find out about it right away,” said Peter Tapling, a payments consultant and former Early Warning executive. “That intersection of brand new modern systems, and clunky old bank systems is going to become more evident.”
JPMorgan Chase acknowledged responsibility for the disruption following Zelle's attribution of the outage to the bank.
The $3.9 trillion-asset banking giant refrained from commenting on the cause of the outage and stated that the issue had been resolved by midday Wednesday, despite ongoing complaints from users on DownDetector, a platform for collecting user outage reports.
During JPMorgan's outage, other banks participating in the Zelle network did not experience disruptions.
JPMorgan holds the largest portion of payments on the Zelle network. Crone Consulting LLC reports that twenty-two percent of Zelle transactions involve JPMorgan's consumer or business clients.
The consulting firm estimates that the bank processes more than $2 billion across approximately 27 million transactions daily, serving 54 million unique users through Zelle.
Before complaint volumes started to decrease the next day, over 1,500 users encountered difficulties accessing Zelle on DownDetector on Tuesday. Chase and Early Warning chose not to disclose the number of banks and consumers impacted.
When one of the largest banks on a network goes down, “you can't help but have some disruption generally,” Tapling said. “But those don't represent outages of Zelle. Those represent outages on one side of a two-sided payments exchange.”
Recent disruptions in payment networks expose a fundamental challenge: seamlessly integrating modern, real-time, app-based systems with legacy bank infrastructure designed for paper checks.
“At the network level, FedNow, RTP — those are generally written under modern architectures that have modern system resilience, failover capabilities, etc.,” Tapling said. ” While efforts have been made to modernize core infrastructures, those core systems are really hard to replace.”
Foretell problems
When a major bank such as JPMorgan Chase experiences an outage, it could indicate trouble for real-time-payment networks, as an increasing number of consumers, businesses, and financial institutions come to anticipate real-time payments.
“These kinds of issues are going to come up. And [they] won't be fixed until the industry goes to a true real-time processing scheme for their core systems, which is not likely to come any day soon,” said Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting LLC.
“The unexplained outage at Chase and its implications for Zelle point to the challenges of integrating real-time payment systems like FedNow with legacy batch-based bank systems designed over 70 years ago, which have to be adapted to accommodate non-repudiation and real-time processing requirements.”
Zelle's quickness to attribute fault to JPMorgan Chase, the primary owner of Early Warning, could signify the disparity between the contemporary frameworks employed by payment providers and the antiquated systems integrated by banks.
When outages occur, Zelle redirects consumers to their issuing banks, including other Early Warning co-owners such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC, in response to service queries from users.
“What's interesting here is that very few, if any, payment networks ever point the finger and blame the issuing bank,” Crone said. “That has brand implications and trust implications for financial institutions, and they have to manage their publics like any other crisis management.”
Neither Early Warning nor JPMorgan provided comments on whether the public affairs message had been coordinated before its issuance. Participating banks are accountable for overseeing their own fraud protections and responses.
“I think they're just trying to make clear that it's not a network resilience issue,” Tapling said, noting that JPMorgan's sizable ownership stake in Early Warning suggests that their relationship was not souring.
“The network wants to make sure that the public sees the network is being stable and reliable. They are protecting their own interests.”
According to Crone, Zelle may expose itself to risk, regulation, and liability if it fails to clearly indicate that the issuing bank bears responsibility for any failures.
“Admitting anything less opens up Pandora's box,” he said.
Intrinsic risk
Considering the innate settlement risk associated with Zelle, it must ensure with 99.999% certainty that the system is processing accurately. If it fails to do so, they will shut it down, as per Crone.
Outdated technology may also impede Early Warning's aspirations for Paze, a digital wallet it recently tested with its seven bank owners and plans to expand later this year.
“A digital wallet such as Paze has even more critical dependencies with greater potential for processing interruptions.
This outage threatens Early Warning's Paze launch, highlighting settlement and processing risks, which may hinder adoption by retailers, issuers, and other stakeholders in the payments value chain,” Crone said.
“It is not an isolated incident, and it doesn't bode well for trying to gain pilot customers and showcase customers to try Paze, either merchants or issuing banks, beyond the seven owners.”
According to Crone, banks and their investors may disapprove of the rapidity with which payment providers attribute blame to them during outages, particularly if disruptions impact RTP or FedNow. This may indicate a necessity for more comprehensive public affairs contingency planning.
“This should be a warning, and really be a wake up call, to having your crisis management plan in place before launching RTP or FedNow,” Crone said.
“[If] the settlement value chain were to break down, the real time part of RTP or the non repudiation of real time payments — that promise could be affected.”
But to mitigate outages, it may be more important for banks to upgrade payment systems for modern times, Tapling said.
“They could have had a minor outage and nobody would have noticed it. But now you have mobile banking, where you could be looking at your bank app seven times a day,” Tapling said.
“As we move more towards instant payments, those financial institutions that exist in more fragile environments are going to be exposed.”