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Did the US Federal Reserve’s payment network go offline on the same day that the crypto market broke out?

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.

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.

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.

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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Nawaz Sulemanji

Nawaz has been hooked on crypto since buying his first Bitcoin’s in 2013. After studying maths in London, Nawaz initially spent the first eight years of his career working globally across corporate supply chain’s before transitioning into the decentralised finance industry as a margin-trader and consultant. He’s a fan of open-blockchains because “it enables self-sovereignty”.