Federal Reserve System Crashes Two Days After Yellen Calls Bitcoin “Inefficient”
Two days after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen slammed Bitcoin for being an “inefficient” way to conduct finances, the Federal Reserve computer systems went offline for a while.
“I don’t think that Bitcoin … is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC’s Andrew Ross. “To the extent it is used I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called bitcoin “extremely inefficient” and warned about its use in illicit activity. https://t.co/nFL9JPsPiB pic.twitter.com/tlhobhiOub
— CNBC (@CNBC) February 24, 2021
The Fed blamed the issue on a “Federal Reserve operational error.” It disrupted nearly all of the services as of 11:15 a.m. Eastern time.
One user posted a screenshot from the site earlier today.
The Federal Reserve is experiencing an outage.https://t.co/250xeftk9p pic.twitter.com/0kUUUjPhvg
— Cameron Winklevoss (@cameron) February 24, 2021
“We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available,” the Fed said in an announcement shortly after 2 p.m.
According to The Hill, the error disrupted essential Federal Reserve tools, including FedACH, which banks use to transfer money with each other. FedWire was also affected, which handles same-day transactions for banks and businesses.
The Fed reopened its portal for applications, but all other crashed services are unavailable as of 3 P.M. Eastern time.
