It seems not a single major news media source has written about the very serious and extended outage of the BillPay service provided by major U.S. Banks. Bank customers throughout the U.S. are complaining and being held hostage for nearly two days now. Evidence of this can be seen in Twitter.
This began with my own unhappy experience of not being able to log into my Suntrust BillPay on Monday night around 8pm. I tried a couple more times with no success. On Tuesday morning, there was no error message. Only the inability to log in to my BillPay from my Suntrust Online Banking Account.
As I stayed in my home office working patiently waiting for an opportunity to input some urgent payments in addition to checking on what payments should be coming out tomorrow, I finally called the toll-free number customer service number and was politely informed that BillPay was down since 3pm on Monday afternoon. Tuesday has come and nearly gone. We are headed into Wednesday with no indication when the BillPay service will be available again.
Because there seems to be zero coverage of this extensive and widespread BillPay outage, I took to Twitter to do my own research and write this update. Hopefully, Google will pick this up and disseminate to BillPay victims being held hostage.
It appears many people are blaming their bank for the BillPay problem when in reality the BillPay problem is actually larger than any one bank.
From my Twitter research and my own accounts with four of these banks, the following banks are suffering from the same BillPay outage:
- Bank of America
- Bank Atlantic
- Charles Schwab
- First Tech Federal Credit Union
- ING Direct
- Suntrust Bank
- Synovus Banks
- Wells Fargo
There are probably many, many banks that I have not listed but affected and simply not showing up on the Twitter feed but I will add those names as I find out about them.
It tells me that the BillPay service is larger than any one bank. I am unsure if BillPay is being provided by a single vendor of which the various banks and credit unions purchase and use.
It seems apparent to me, there is going to be hell to pay because of the resulting late fees that will be incurred by the tens of thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands) accounts nationwide. It seems no one in customer service knows anything. The online customer service rep I spoke to said this afternoon that there were hundreds of complaints already.
Myself alone I have quite a few large payments that were due today and tomorrow. I question whether those payments will be made now despite the fact they were put in two weeks ago.
This has got to be the most severe BillPay outage that I can recall. I am still monitoring my Twitter feed in hopes there is some indication that BillPay service will be restored. I hope to provide an update later tonight or tomorrow morning.
