JP Morgan Users Hit With Another Outage

Last Thursday, JP Morgan users discovered to their horror that, for the second time in recent memory, virtually every part of their mobile banking experience was completely unavailable. Though JP Morgan did move to get everything back up and running that day, the end result was a lot of very unhappy—and unsatisfied—customers.

Out for much of Thursday, JP Morgan announced that the systems were back up and spinning with a simple tweet which read “Our digital channels are back to full strength. Thanks for your patience.” There was no further explanation of just what happened to said digital channels beyond that, a point that rankled with many users. The only other communication from the bank, reports noted, was one other tweet that notified users that “…some functions of chase.com and our Chase Mobile app are not working properly. We are working hard to fix the issue and are sorry for the inconvenience.”

Angry users took to Twitter to provide the commentary that JP Morgan either couldn’t or wouldn’t, complete with pictures of error messages received. When the customers found that the service outages had extended all the way to the bank branches as well in some places—a point that JP Morgan hadn’t noted, at last report—the pitch of outrage ramped up.

The last such outage happened back last May, when online and mobile payments were flatlined due to some kind of unelaborated-upon glitch in the system.

Given that, back in June, we were hearing about how Chase shut down 190 bank branches in 2017, as part of a larger effort that’s been going on since 2015—due to customers increasingly preferring mobile payments and banking operations—this isn’t good news for the company. In fact, this is the kind of thing that might get more than a few users thinking about shutting down JP Morgan accounts and instead moving them to other banks. Especially if JP Morgan’s idea of customer contact is a message when the problem starts and another when it’s over; it’s better to over communicate in cases like these because people are naturally concerned about their money.

In the end, it’s about the consumer, a point that JP Morgan might have to learn about the hard way if it keeps getting hit with outages and not keeping the customers informed more thoroughly.