10 ms·
The Fed Is Down
- dragontamer 6y agohttps://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-perspective-part-1/ https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers... A good time to remind people that the USA's money-transfer system (aka: ACH) is a giant Rube-Goldberg machine involving FTP transfers of specially formatted files. So it sounds like the Fed's FTP server is down?? Or something like that?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ohiovr 6y agoWhy wouldn't they use SFTP?
- sodality2 6y agoMeet the US government... Triple DES is still used for backwards compatibility in banking
- dragontamer 6y agoThe Fed is a private entity actually. The Treasury is US Government. But the Fed is owned by the member banks. The US kinda coopted a seat at their table and Congress + President appoints the Fed head. But otherwise, the rest of the board is made up by private companies.
- Meekro 6y agoCalling the Fed a private entity is really misleading. It was created by an act of Congress and its highest ranking officials, the Board of Governors, are all appointed by the President. Yes, it shares some power with the banks it regulates (who can elect representatives), but the US government didn't "coopt a seat at the table." It built the table and had most of the seats from the start. And it's true that member banks own stock in the Fed, but it's a super-funky kind of stock ownership. That stock can't be sold or traded, and doesn't grant the kind of voting rights one normally associates with stock ownership. It only entitles the stockholder to their share of the dividends the Fed pays every year. The Fed actually returns nearly all of its profits (something like 95%) to the US Treasury, and pays the rest as dividends to shareholder banks.
- jerry1979 6y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but people constructed a cleavage between the Fed and the US Govt because they thought we shouldn't trust democracy with money creation.
- dragontamer 6y agoThe proper role of the US Government and Money has been under debate ever since Hamilton was appointed Treasury Secretary under George Washington. (EDIT: actually, even earlier than that, but the country didn't exist yet...) Jefferson wanted one system, Hamilton wanted another. And the two sides have been arguing for the past 200+ years. Sometimes, the central bank appears, sometimes it disappears. Then silver+gold, then removal of the silver standard (gold-only standard), then etc. etc. etc. The Revolutionary War required money and bonds. Immediately upon the end of that war came the question of how to organize and pay those loans. Should it be held by the states? Or by the national government? Should a central bank even exist, or is a loose collection of banks good enough? Should there be a national currency, or should the States make their own currency? The Continental Congress's dollar was hit severely by inflation: losing 99% of its value in just a decade or so. Not a big deal: most Americans used Spanish Pesos back then due to their reliable silver weight. The money issue was front-and-center at the birth of this country. Lots of debate and discussion (and duels!!) occurred over the issue. Arguing about money (literally to death) is a proud American tradition.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The proper role of the US Government and Money has been under debate ever since Hamilton was appointed Treasury Secretary under George Washington. (EDIT: actually, even earlier than that, but the country didn't exist yet...) In regard to the parenthetical, the country existed either from the First Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the surrender at Yorktown, but in any case before the adoption of the Constitution, much less Hamilton's appointment under it as the first Secretary of the Treasury, which is a really odd point to chose as the starting point of the nation.
- 6y ago
- smitty1e 6y ago>The Fed is a private entity actually. The idea of the Federal Reserve urinates all over the Constitutional principle that people weilding power stand for election. Doom on us for permitting such.
- lrem 6y agoDon't touch if it isn't broken? From what I've seen in other countries, you don't update protocols for this. You introduce better ones and kill the old ones once nobody used them for a while. Which might take longer than expected, because "free instant transfers" might be seen as cannibalizing the "slightly less slow expensive transfers" any given bank might have on offer.
- xtracto 6y agoI deal with the ACH network on a daily basis and let me tell you it IS broken. The fact that you only receive negative ack when a transaction fails, otherwise you have to pray your transaction went through is so bad it sounds like a joke. For comparison, the third world underdeveloped country where I live has an electronic cash transfer system allowing me to send ANY amount of money in 10 minutes at most for $0.5 usd.
- throwaway20875 6y agoI worked in fintech in NYC for a bit. The technology driving most critical financial infrastructure in the US is astoundingly antiquated. It is only sustained through the sheer amount of bodies and ingenuity thrown at it.
- gruez 6y agoIt's probably VPNed and/or FTP over TLS (aka FTPS).
- xtracto 6y agoNo, these things use SFTP which is mainly ssh over 22
- gruez 6y agoanecdotal counter-evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638063 This is probably because people often conflate SFTP (ssh-based protocol) with FTPS (FTP over TLS) eg. royal bank which says "secure ftp" (which suggests SFTP), but also mentions SSL (which suggests FTPS). https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/ach/cid-212563.html https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/ach/cid-212563.html
- throwawayboise 6y agoIt's OK, customers can use the backup system which is sending in 9-track tape reels via FedEx.
- analog31 6y agoIt's reassuring to know that our money system is safe from parity errors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- efficax 6y agoSome of the first software I ever wrote for pay was a daily shell script that pgp encrypted an ACH batch and sent it from one financial institution to another over a dedicated frame-link, via FTP. This was over 20 years ago! Can't believe it's still the same.
- cout 6y agoSounds like bliss! Twenty years ago I was working on a project that received financial data through a Y-cable connected to a printer port. One day, we stopped getting data and could not figure out why. Turns out the printer had run out of paper.
- aksss 6y agoWe had to write jobs to encrypt the NACHA files and send over FTP years ago, but I was at the same company long enough (prior to 2010) to see the banks at least adopt SFTP. Slightly better, but still encrypted the files. Hey, it works and is reliable. I learned banks are really cheap, though, definitely not in the mood to spend money on new systems/processes even if they'd improve productivity.
- agumonkey 6y ago> involving FTP transfers of specially formatted files. during my internship, a big healthcare representative came at the company to ask for help about their IT system. Turns out it was mass FTP transfer. I was silent for a few minutes thinking hospital networks relied on this.
- dmd 6y agoAnd then there's DICOM for transferring medical images, which most places don't authenticate at ALL (or do just based on the AETITLE, which is almost always the name of the manufacturer e.g. SIEMENS).
- toomim 6y agoFedwire is not ACH. Those are different systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network Fedwire is a much faster, more modern system than ACH. You can only access it if you are a bank, though. ACH is available to anyone, but it's old and uses FTP. There are also a faster modernized next-day and same-day versions of ACH available as of the last few years. I haven't checked out their protocols, though, to see if they still use FTP.
- avereveard 6y ago> FTP transfers of specially formatted files. there's nothing wrong with that, at least it isn't fake-rest, and most other delivery technology are proprietary anyway.
- samstave 6y agoSo an FTP story of history: TL;DR: this is how LinuxCare came to be: 1997 - BindCo was a contract manfacturer for the publication of all SUN Systems OS CD media... Based in Redwood City Ca. I was the IT manager there... So SUN has a conf call with us, as we were creating and serving and receiving orders via FTP (I cant recall the name for the process) - but basically: We would receive an order manifest via FTP to a server and then we would have to make an order form for what was required... Our FTP servers required us to login and manually accept and find these manifests.... So we hired some consultants; Dave Sifry and some others who went on to google etc.. But here was the thing: We were taking orders via FTP and SUN wanted us to start accepting this new protocol they deemed XML and wanted us to be the test case for XML and I did something stupid: I, on a call with SUN, said the following as a young IT manager: "So let me get this straight; *"You have a crappy data reporting system and you want us to install an unknown system called XML for data qualification into our system and we have never heard of it"* Yeah, I might have prevented months of adoption of XML by accident. What have you done as a major fuck-up in your career? That company became LinuxCare and Sifry was valued at $100 million Just based on me telling david he should create a company that offered Linux support...
- justinzollars 6y agohttps://frbservices.org/app/status/serviceStatus.do https://frbservices.org/app/status/serviceStatus.do
- justinzollars 6y agoAffected Areas: Account Services, Check 21, Check Adjustments, FedACH, FedLine Advantage, FedLine Command, FedLine Direct, FedLine Web, Fedwire Funds, Fedwire Securities, National Settlement
- schraeds 6y agoAbout 3/4 of services seem to be back up now, including ACH
- justinzollars 6y agoyup. Looks like things are quickly being resolved.
- latchkey 6y ago.do is struts, well known for a myriad of security holes. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/9907/in-a-uri-what-does-the-suffix-do-stand-for https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/9907/in-a-uri... https://doublepulsar.com/apache-struts-and-the-three-leading-us-credit-agencies-7c2bf1c9661e https://doublepulsar.com/apache-struts-and-the-three-leading...
- bostonsre 6y agoAnyone know what the fed uptime was for last year? Or how common these types of issues are for the fed? Sounds like a massive impact if they normally move ~$3.4 trillion a day..
- justinzollars 6y agoIt's huge. This is a big story
- schraeds 6y agoHappened towards end of 2019, didn't seem to have a big impact on anything... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/fed-says-ach-payment-system-operational-after-suffering-a-delay https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/fed-says-...
- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/ach/quality-volume-statistics.html https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/ach... Target uptime for the last eight years is 99.85% (ACH service availability), exceeded in all years going back to 2012. Couldn't find a FedWire (which was also down) quality stats page, but I'd expect similar uptime targets and measured quality.
- silexia 6y agoThis is what happens when government runs areas of the economy. Private companies can go bankrupt when they get obsolete, but government agencies have massive political pull and are never dismantled. The nation that can figure out a bankruptcy process for government agencies will be the leader in future centuries.
- droffel 6y agoThe Federal Reserve is a private company.
- insertnickname 6y agoYes, but not really.
- boredumb 6y agoIt's a private company in name only. It was enacted through congress with a board of directors that are actually a federal government agency. Saying it's a private company is not even technically true. It's gluing feathers to my iguana and calling it a bird.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoIt's not surprising how many people aren't aware of that. When you look at the ceremony around the chair and reports to congress, when you read Wikipedia articles, it sounds as if we have a government owned central bank when in fact we have a private entity with distributed and opaque governance which is ostensibly accountable to the congress although I've not seen congress ever act like it has any accountability for fed behavior.
- billiam 6y agoNot true. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act and assigns to the Board the implementation of it and regulations that are written down in the Code of Federal Regulations. And the Chair is confirmed in the Senate of course.
- 6y ago
- anandsuresh 6y agoObligatory "Bitcoin would solve this!" post. :)
- krupan 6y agohttps://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/
- zhoujianfu 6y ago"The Bitcoin network has been functional for 99.9861136495 % of the time since its inception on Jan 3 2009 02:54:25 GMT" ...for certain definitions of "functional".
- kemofo 6y agoThe irony of name "Federal Reserve" is that there is nothing Federal about it. The Fed is a completely autonomous private organization which controls the United States money supply.
- umeshunni 6y agoThat's an adorable meme that crypto-bros like to tweet, but really they are actually an agency of the federal government and answerable to Congress. From https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm Who owns the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.
- trident5000 6y agolol "crypto-bros" that claim has been around way longer than crypto has been popular. I get the crypto hate since its taking big tech power away and your jobs. Good luck.
- goodluckchuck 6y agoI think it's fair to question the wisdom (and legality) of agencies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...) that are "independent" of the constitution's separation of powers. The constitution vests Judicial power in an independent judiciary, but provides that the POTUS shall be elected and that executive power shall be vested in him/her... and that legislative power shall be vested in Congress, with Representatives and Senators elected by the people. To say that there are agencies that are simply outside of that system... it seems to fly in the face of the basic things that kids learn in Elementary school. The Department of Defense (aka military) takes their orders from the POTUS / Commander in Chief. We should freak if the military went rogue and decided to invade a country without approval. Yet, we're supposed to want other executive departments to act without regard to the wishes of the elected president? > [The FED] is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress. I mean, it sounds as if they're claiming to be a Legislative Branch agency.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoWe used to send/receive magnetic tapes via plane for interbank settlements since our data center was located in a different province to all of the other major banks. Now there is a real-time settlement system for the entire country.
- aksss 6y agoReddit appears down right now as well with 503 errors.. coincidence?
- aminozuur 6y agoI suspect this wouldn't be that big of a headline, if it weren't for crypto-kiddies seeing it as an argument for crypto.
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoMan, I know there's a real joke here about ACH and FTP, but the older I get, the better I feel about systems that are almost too simple to a fault. I'd rather have that and deal with its limitations than try and stomach what passes for modern engineering these days. Some solutions I see these days should be considered criminally negligent if they were to be used in any HA environments for governments, health care organizations, or similar bodies.
- natas 6y agoas long as the printer is up...
- kemofo 6y agoI'm afraid this will be lost on most.