Fedwire, the real-time gross settlement system owned and operated by the 12 Federal Reserve banks in the US, was reported to have been offline for part of the day on Tuesday, April 2nd.
The event occurred on the same day that Bitcoin and other large-cap crypto projects reported $25 billion in gains from a 15% move to the upside.
reddit-embed-bq" style="height:500px" >Today the United States Federal Reserve experienced an unexpected issue and went completely down. No incoming or outgoing wires went through in the entire country. It’s is still unresolved and yet not one single news outlet seems to be reporting on this and the massive impact it has.
byu/Sweet-Lady-H innews
The event was reported across social media channels like Reddit and Twitter.
Reddit user Sweet-Lady-H reported: “Today the United States Federal Reserve experienced an unexpected issue and went completely down. No incoming or outgoing wires went through in the entire country.”
Just 15 minutes after the initial post, she stated: “Update: of course after several hours of being down (approximately noon PST).”
A screenshot of the tracker link she included was posted on Twitter and then liked by crypto evangelist Anthony ‘Pomp’ Pompliano.
Fedwire Funds down – bitcoin is never down @APompliano pic.twitter.com/bNQ7KLMrBE
— Sri (@srioddiraju) April 1, 2019
When questioned about her line of work, Sweet-Lady-H said: “I work in a job that requires wire transfers and all wires were not sent or received after about noon/1 ish west coast time. I assume most people weren’t as aware because of the typical cutoff time anyway.
“But we had several deals today that couldn’t be completed because none of the banks could send us money and we couldn’t send any out either. Looks like it finally came back up about 30 minutes ago or so.
“It’s the idea that it could become a bigger problem. It was a moment of realisation today that if our wire system went down, how would it impact a lot of transactions?”
Who else reported it?
The outage was also reported by a Twitter user with 86,000 followers (and 900 follows) called Jordan Sather. Apart from his below tip-off from a “little birdie”, he mainly talks about other conspiracies relating to Pentagon budgets.
A little birdie sent this my way
“Fedwire”, a service the Federal Reserve uses to transfer between it’s member banks or other banks with Fed accounts, is down Fed-wide.
More about Fedwire – https://t.co/urCU08lBnQ
This site shows its down – https://t.co/xOklCEw5Rs pic.twitter.com/igkhYsg0CG
— Jordan Sather (@Jordan_Sather_) April 1, 2019
Can Bitcoin do better?
With Bitcoin dominating over 50% of the total cryptocurrency market cap, the digital asset has been more stable, immutable, and more resilient than all other open blockchains in the wild today.
According to bitcoinuptime.com, “The Bitcoin network has been functional for 99.9835403676 % of the time since its inception on Jan 3 2009 02:54:25 GMT.”
The only two downtime events to have taken place were when we saw the “August 15, 2010, Value overflow incident” for 8 hours and 27 minutes and then the “August 16, 2013, Berkeley DB” event.
Apart from these two early events (the last one was over five years ago), the network has continued to churn out updated transactions and blocks around every 10 minutes.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.