Bank of America’s Web site continued to be troubled by sporadic problems for much of the day on Tuesday, as has been the case in four of the last five days.
Visitors to the site were greeted with this message: “We’re sorry, our site is running slowly.”
“As a result, you may experience delays or have difficulty accessing parts of bankofamerica.com, including Online Banking. We’re actively working to resolve these issues. You may wish to defer your transaction until a nonpeak time.”
By Tuesday evening, the Web site seemed to be functioning normally again.
The problems first cropped up on Friday, a day after the bank, the nation’s largest, announced it would impose a new $5 a month charge on some debit cardholders. But a bank official insisted the problems were not caused by hackers angered by the new fee or efforts to flood the site with traffic as a protest, a strategy called a denial of service attack.
“Every indication is that recent performance issues have not been the result of hacking, malware or a denial of service attack,” said Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for the bank. “Our customer information is safe, the online banking site is largely operating normally. A notice to customers was posted as a precaution. We continue to assess the situation.”
She declined to further explain the specific cause behind the difficulties but another bank official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the volume of traffic on the site had been unusually high in recent days.
The problems have been intermittent since Friday, continuing on Saturday but clearing up Sunday, only to return Monday.
The site’s problems were magnified for many bank customers because they typically pay their bills in the first part of the month.
“Financial institutions live and die by their ability to do online banking,” said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor now with CSC, an information technology services firm.
The breakdown has already caused some longtime customers to take their business elsewhere. “How hard is it to maintain a Web site?” asked Mark Hugh Miller, a writer in Los Angeles who has been a Bank of America customer for 40 years but said he planned to switch his checking account to a local credit union.
Mr. Miller said he first encountered problems on Sunday night when he tried to log on and see if a check he had written had cleared. He finally managed to get through on Tuesday morning.
“It wasn’t just slowness,” he said. “Sometimes, the site never opened. Other times, it was unresponsive.”
While nearly all highly trafficked consumer sites encounter slowdowns from time to time, the length of the difficulties at Bank of America’s Web site is unusual, technology experts said.
“Today is the fourth day,” said Ken Godskind, vice president for monitoring products at SmartBear Software. “This is an awfully long time for something to be going on.”
If the problems were not caused by hackers or an attack, other causes might be a surge in traffic connected to the new $5 fee or a change or upgrade to the bank’s internal system that unexpectedly slowed the site, Mr. Godskind said. He said the times when the site was working, like Sunday, tend to be low-traffic periods.
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