On Wednesday morning, Bank of America customers began reporting issues with payments processed through the money transfer service Zelle, which led to money disappearing from their accounts.
Many customers took to Twitter to express their outrage as they began to notice the missing funds.
One user tweeted, “I almost lost my mind when I saw $2,000 was missing from my account.”
Another said, “So cool how @BankofAmerica magically disappeared a large Zelle transaction that HAD ALREADY POSTED and I had used to pay bills. Now I’m extremely in debt in my checking and I can’t get ahold of them. Unbelievable.”
Zelle is a money transfer service that works with U.S. banks to move funds directly from one bank account to another. Zelle transfers are quick and free––making the service a popular alternative to credit card transactions that can take a few days to hit users’ accounts and often require fees and bank transfers. However, the service has been under fire by government officials for being an easy facilitator for fraud and theft.
The website downdetector.com reported over 1,000 outage reports for Bank of America by 10:30 a.m. EST, coupled with a similar spike in Zelle outage reports.
Over a customer support social media account, Zelle redirected users to Bank of America, saying, “The Zelle App & Network are up & running. We are aware of an issue that is impacting Bank Of America customers when sending & receiving payments. We recommend contacting Bank of America’s customer support team for additional updates.”
Zelle does not offer any protection for payments made through their services—which means that there’s no safeguard for customers if a transaction goes wrong.
Bank of America told TIME that, as…
