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Faster Forward: Chase Web site breaks down. But why?
When I tried to log into one of my credit-card accounts last night, I was puzzled not to see the usual log-in form on the home page of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Then I saw a notice that the site was "temporarily unavailable" and figured I could just ... try again tomorrow.
That might take a while longer, as the New York-based firm continues to greet Web visitors with this message: "Our website is temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to restore access. Please log on later."
It seems that the bank is suffering the kind of site-wide meltdown that animates the nightmares of information-technology professionals.
Sadly, these things do happen. Sites go down all the time; the world is an imperfect place. (Nobody working at the Post in early 2004 will soon forget the time we somehow neglected to renew our washpost.com domain-name registration.)
But Chase's meltdown has lasted longer than most. And it's had a bigger effect on people who can't check their balances or pay their bills online and have been knocked back to such analog forms of banking as phone calls (Chase's toll-free number is 800-935-9935) and branch visits. People are less inclined to be forgiving when a big part of their financial infrastructure stops working.
So what happened here? A Bloomberg BusinessWeek story quotes Chase spokesman Tom Kelly as saying that the bank is working to fix a "technical problem" that is not further explained. In a phone interview, Kelly didn't expand on that description or offer a time for the site's operation to return (perhaps understandably; those sorts of promises rarely survive contact with reality).
So for now, we can only imagine what happened to Chase's servers.
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