Cheat Sheet: What it means when the Federal Reserve goes down
- The Federal Reserve payments system went down yesterday for a few hours.
- The outage impacted ACH payments, interbank transfers, and payroll.

Yesterday, Federal Reserve systems that execute millions of financial transactions a day were disrupted by what appeared to be some sort of internal snafu. The systems were down for about four hours and are used for lots of different purposes, including payroll, tax refunds, and interbank transfers.
“Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error,” the Fed said on Wednesday on its website. “The Federal Reserve Banks have taken steps to help ensure the resilience of the Fedwire and NSS applications, including recovery to the point of failure.”
What happened
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