Last week, an unknown number of Wells Fargo customers were suddenly unable to access deposits in their bank accounts.
Even as it sought to address the issue, which customers first began noticing on Aug. 3, Wells Fargo acknowledged a “limited” number of customers were still having issues 24 hours later, leaving some of them unable to access funds for critical needs.
For Wells Fargo, it was the second time this year that such an issue had occurred. Wells Fargo declined to comment when NBC News reached out to understand the exact cause and scope of the issues.
More recently, further investigation discovered third-party impostors created fraudulent accounts at Wells Fargo. (In that case, the bank has denied any wrongdoing and said the problem is widespread across the financial industry).
At least one other bank has also left customers scrambling to access their money in the wake of an outage of unknown origin: Some depositors with Green Dot Bank, which works with Walmart among other third parties to provide financial services, say they have been unable to get money from their accounts for days or even weeks.