Clark Howard

Customers outraged after BB&T ‘malfunction' locks them out of their accounts

BB&T Bank was the subject of customer anger for a second striaght day Friday in the midst of a “equipment malfunction” which has affected millions. Many reported being locked out of their accounts, not being able to use their ATMs or do online banking.

On Friday morning, the bank said it had finally isolated the problem, although it is still not fixed.

BB&T customers locked out of their accounts due to outage

"The issue we're working on was caused by an equipment malfunction in one of our data centers. At this time, we have no reason to believe this issue is related to cyber security," the company posted on Facebook. "We are well into the process of making those repairs, but we understand this is a major inconvenience for so many of you. We are so sorry, and we're working very hard to restore your services as soon as possible."

An outage map showed areas like Virginia, central Florida, northern Ohio, Maryland, north Georgia and Pennsyvlania being affected on Friday.

Responding to an individual customer’s inquiry about not being able to see if their direct deposit was posted, the bank said on Facebook: “Once the system comes up we will process transactions and everything should be up to date. This is has been and will be a challenging day to say the least!”

And that was just Friday; the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based company said that the outage began Thursday afternoon. That’s when the bank said in a statement around 5:30 p.m.: “At this time, many of our services are unavailable, including digital banking, Phone24, and ATM. Thank you for your patience as we work diligently to restore your services.”

Obviously, the situation has led to frustration from customers, especially because it’s pay day for a lot of them. But as of now they are unable to access their funds.

BB&T vows to ‘work with’ customers on their accounts

BB&T’s social accounts have been answering customers’ questions and apologizing, but many people are demanding that something more be done. As the situation continues to unfold, the bank has promised the following two things:

  • If you've incurred any fees or experienced any issues directly related to the outage, BB&T said it "will work with you to address those issues as our systems come back online."
  • Cybersecurity is not an issue, so customers can rest easy about their personal information being at risk.

Team Clark will monitor this story and provide you with the latest developments as BB&T works to resolve the issue.

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