Fed Is Down
frbservices.org
frbservices.org
February 24, 2021 2:14 PM Eastern Time Beginning around 11:15 a.m. ET, Federal Reserve Bank staff became aware of a disruption for all services. Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error. We will provide updates via service status as more information becomes available. We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.
February 24, 2021 1:18 PM Eastern Time The Federal Reserve Bank staff is currently investigating a disruption to multiple services. We will continue to provide updates as soon as they are available.
February 24, 2021 12:43 PM Eastern Time The Federal Reserve Bank staff is currently investigating a possible issue or disruption to multiple services. We will provide updates as soon as they are available.
February 24, 2021 2:36 PM Eastern Time We are in process of restarting the Fedwire Services and National Settlement Service and expect to resume normal processing this afternoon. We plan to extend the cutoff times for the Fedwire Securities Service and may also extend the cutoff times for the National Settlement Service and Fedwire Funds Service. We will provide additional updates about these extensions.
February 24, 2021 2:32 PM Eastern Time Access to FedCash Services via the FedLine Web solution has been restored. We are extending the cash order deadline for FedCash Services to 3:30 p.m. local time of the servicing Federal Reserve Bank. Please contact your local FedCash Services customer support if you have any questions. For a complete list of customer support contacts for your institution, please visit the Contact page.
I know the Fed is responsible for resolving transactions between banks, but one would expect they'd have a very very broad and resilient system.
But cryptocurrencies are philosophically opposed to central control. And authorities are generally behind the times when it comes to technology. But it boils down to outdated technology based on "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Seems like a good demonstration of why a distributed technology like a "real" central bank digital currency would be an improvement.
And some newer cryptocurrency strategies have very high transaction rates.
Less than two hours of downtime is nothing to write home about, and the Fed is down less frequently than major cloud providers and others those in technology would be familiar with and consider critical services. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and it doesn't get much more simple than message queues and worker processes.
So this is a different discussion than the one your previous comment argues against.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" is a nice-sounding catchphrase but in many contexts does not hold water. For example, systems without redundancy are objectively simpler but not more reliable.
But more fundamentally, currency and money IS a technology. It's use is as you say to distribute power and express trust. But fundamentally it is a technology used for that purpose.
Cryptocurrency is ultimately about putting power in the hands of the people and trust in mathematics rather than central authorities.
Eventually the central banks and banking institutions as they exist now will be phased out and replaced with different paradigms that have some similar functions but more sophisticated technology.
You don't necessarily need to use a publicly available cryptocurrency that exists in the wild today. If an organization was motivated enough and thought it was a good idea, they could simply launch their own private blockchain on their own hardware that they control. With your own blockchain on your own hardware you could still reap the benefits of decentralized compute power, and build your own smart contracts system that can broker chargebacks. The barrier to entry for an endeavor like this is the lowest its ever been too, you can even spin up a managed blockchain on AWS these days.