The U.S. Federal Reserve's electronic payment system, which is used to process transactions for mortgages, fund transfers, and fundraising, has been partially restored.
The system crash on Wednesday sent ripples throughout the U.S. financial markets as it is essentially the central framework for the county's banking systems where billions of dollars flow through every day.
The country's central bank said in a post on social late Wednesday that it has partially restored some of its services. However, some banking applications were reportedly still experiencing issues as of Thursday.
The Federal Reserve did not elaborate on the exact cause of the outage and only blamed it on an "operational error."
"A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines. We are restoring services and are communicating with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations," Federal Reserve spokesman, Jim Strader, said.
Money transfer companies and credit unions were unable to process any transactions during the nationwide outage. The Federal Reserve said that pending transactions should now go through and they are advising all users to avoid resending requests.
The agency said that the backlog of files may take some time to clear and delays are to be expected.
The outage reportedly lasted for about two hours before it was successfully restored later in the afternoon on Wednesday. Several companies that use the central bank's services published online posts about the disruption to their services.
The Federal Reserve said that it is currently investigating the disruption, which had affected Fedwire and FedACH services.
The agency said that technicians will be working to find the problem and prevent the same thing from happening again. Among those that were affected by the outage was cryptocurrency exchange company Gemini, which said that it was unable to process transactions.
The agency's Fedwire funds transfer system is one of the world's largest conduits for payments. The system allows more than 9,289 American financing institutions to electronically transfer funds between each other, according to the agency's website.
