Day After Big Debit Fee Hike, BofA Homepage Fails

Bank of America’s homepage was down Friday morning, a day after the megabank announced that it will begin charging customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. Instead of the bank’s normal site, visitors receive a notice stating “Home Page Temporarily Unavailable,” followed by the message, “We’re sorry, but some of our pages are temporarily unavailable.”

The site indicates that the bank’s online banking system is still working, but a number of commenters to Credit.com’s website say that it is not. When users attempt to log in to an account, they see the following screen:

From this screen, they again have option to click on a link labeled, “Continue to Online Banking,” but upon doing that, users are shown a screen with the following text: “Error 404: SRVE0190E: File not found: /$clickthru”

Other services, including looking up an ATM or a branch, appear to be operational.

Two spokespeople with the bank did not immediately respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. It’s possible that the website became overwhelmed by so many Bank of America customers and others seeking information about the bank’s debit fee plan, but there’s no indication yet about whether the website failure is related to yesterday’s announcement.

Update (11:35 AM EST): The Bank of America homepage is now back up, however, access to accounts is still not available.

Update (11:58 AM EST): Credit.com was contacted by Bank of America spokeswoman Tara Burke. She told us the following:

“Bank of America.com was having some issues this morning. There were access issues for some customers. Some customers were able to bank online, some experienced access issues. But our text, mobile, ATM and banking centers, no impact there. This was not any compromise to customer information. It was not related to hacking. It has no correlation to the announcement yesterday. ”

When we asked why the service interruption occurred, she said, ”We don’t break out the details of each incident.”

We are still unable to access Bank of America’s online banking portal.

Update (12:20 PM EST): We eventually made it to a login screen after clicking through several error pages, however, when we entered our credentials, we got the following message, “For security purposes, your Countrywide passcode was disabled. You will need to reset your passcode below.” However, no passcode reset tool is present.