Chase apologizes after banking site goes back up

JPMorgan Chase apologized to its online customers Thursday and offered to work with them to refund any fees that were incurred as a result of a three-day computer glitch.

"We apologize for the recent difficulties customers experienced with Chase.com and for not communicating as quickly as possible," said Chase Spokesman Tom Kelly.

Chase's online banking system crashed Monday night and was unavailable all day Tuesday. The system then ran very slowly on Wednesday, allowing only some customers access for most of the business day. "By dinnertime Wednesday it was fine," Kelly said.

Customers were met with an online apology for part of the malfunction: "Please accept our apology for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com. Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us. This was not the level of service we know you expect."

Chase, which was slow to respond to the reason for the glitch, said Thursday that a third party database company's software caused the corruption of systems information disabling its ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com. "This resulted in a long recovery process," Kelly said.

The bank, which has 16.5 million online customers, said it will work with customers to refund any fees that were incurred as a result of the problem. Customers are urged to call the bank if they need assistance with this.

The bank added that payments that were set for Sept. 13, 14 or 15 have been processed and that it's not necessary to reschedule those payments.

For customers worried about their credit rating dipping as a result of a late payment, Kelly said the bank can send a letter to creditors who were late on payments as a result of the outage.

The bank also stressed that customer data was never at risk during the outage.

All other channels, including telephone banking, ATMs and branches, were operating as usual this week.