> “There was no warning that I would not be able to access my accounts for five days,” she added. “If I had to use that money, it was completely inaccessible.”
A good reminder that your emergency fund should be held in cash at a bank, not in shares a brokerage. Not that a glitch like this couldn’t block access to your bank account too, but rather that the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
Something like Fidelity's Cash Management Account (has a debit card, automatically liquidates money market funds to cover spending) works fine as an emergency fund. But you need your emergency fund in two separate accounts at two different financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.
This is not merely a theoretical risk. Patelco (a Bay Area credit union with half a million members) got hit with ransomware back in 2024 that disrupted banking services for two weeks.
You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.
As a good friend, if I know that you are good for the money, I'd happily spot you even a few tens of thousands for a few days or weeks. (I'm actually more reluctant to do that with some family members, because I might be less likely to get the money back.)
Yep, another reminder that community is what makes you resilient. Not to say you shouldn’t personally prepare, but building up your community is preparation. It’s not only about stockpiling for yourself.
I find a T-bill ladder works best for me. I keep half my emergency savings in 4 week bills. Given that my emergency savings is intended to sustain me for months, I can easily access the back half of my savings over the course of 4 weeks as each bill expires, returning another 12.5% of my emergency savings to me.
And in a worst case scenario where I can’t access the front half of my savings due to a bank run or other failure, I am only a week or so away from getting access to some part of my savings.
T-bills are highly liquid. You can sell them before they mature for very low transaction cost and get back their true market value, including the accrued interest, meaning there’s not much monetary benefit to staggering them week by week. You could just as well only roll them once a month and dip in freely if you need the cash.
If you have the capability and discipline to perform a T-bill ladder, you've gotta understand that you're not the person who general financial advice is targeted to. Being deliberately vague, but I've lost nontrivial amounts of money simply because I got distracted when doing a critical financial task and only remembered to get back to it months later. I think I can safely speculate that the story in the source article would never happen to you because you could easily locate the right account numbers if you found yourself locked out of a financial webapp.
I appreciate the vote of confidence but to be clear I just set it up on auto-reinvest for 24 months. There’s an initial setup every two years but the rest is mindless.
Maybe you’re right though. I maintain a non-trivial amount of data in my password manager to ensure I always have a centralized place to begin the hunt for information.
> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
That doesn't seem relevant here. The account disappeared due to a data maintenance error; it wasn't extracted via a legitimate transfer to another account, they literally forgot about it.
Yes, that is why I caveated my comment. But her quote is still a good reason to point out that if there is a chance you might need access to money within short notice (I’d say within a month), it should be in a checking or savings account.
Not totally joking after some thought. If the problem that a person experienced is "complete loss of bank account" then having a physical backup - not at a bank! - would help to cater to that scenario.
And yeah, looks like that's not a foolproof solution either. 3rd backup option might be needed... :D
Friendly reminder that banks are not a reliable place to keep emergency funds, they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
Which is the way it's supposed to work. You keep enough for daily transactions, because the expectation of multiple large scale withdrawals happening either in short succession or simultaneously is the most unlikely scenario to happen during operation. A bank keeps records of every account's value, but at any given time only has enough cash to cover one fifth of all of the money it has on record to be in those accounts. In other words, the bank's physically only got 20% of the money it has on the books. It has to work this way because there's no way a bank could hold all of the money it's customers are said to have, either because of physical space constraints or because there's literally not enough money in existence to cut it out of circulation without creating ridiculous deflation. The change away from the gold standard changed this quite a bit, and so has digital banking, but the numbers in your account are still backed by something that tangibly exists.
> the numbers in your account are still backed by something that tangibly exists
Only if you consider fiat money that can be printed in arbitrary amounts by Mr. Bernanke's famous printing press to be "something that tangibly exists".
Well there's also assets. The bank can hold the value of land deeds or house loans for example. The house and the land it's on are tangible things that can be evaluated. Though I suppose that's a degree removed from printed bills or minted coinage.
> I suppose that's a degree removed from printed bills or minted coinage
Yes, because the "value" of those assets is just a guess until you try to sell them. It might be a highly educated guess, but it's still a guess. And the time the bank would need to sell them--because it needs more cash due to an unusually high demand for cash withdrawals--is precisely the time that your educated guesses all go out the window: you're selling not because you're making a trade to improve your rate of return, but because you need cash, now, and buyers will know that and will gouge you on the price.
The Consumer Price Index has inflated by a factor of more than 15 from January 1947 through March 2026 [1]. That's an annual rate of inflation of about 3.45 percent. That's an indication of how the USD does not hold its value--if you have a stock of dollars that you want to hold the same buying power year to year, you have to add 3.45 percent to it every year just to stay even.
> Now list something what that's actually held its value.
Gee, I dunno, anything whose value as measured in dollars increases by more than 3.45% a year? Like, just off the top of my head, stocks, bonds, real estate, and yes, gold. Bitcoin, maybe.
> A nice, mostly-even 3% a year is spectacular.
I don't think you understand that that 3.45% a year is not a rate of appreciation, as if dollars were an asset. It's a cost that you have to bear every year if you insist on holding dollars instead of something that, um, holds its value. In other words, it's a rate of loss of value of dollars.
> Only a central bank can do that.
If you mean that only a central bank, as an agent of a government, can force people to use money that loses value every year as the central bank prints more, yes, that's quite true. But it doesn't mean what you appear to think it means.
Why would that be necessary? For most people, liquid funds are something that's electronic anyway, and in most countries banks can't run out of customers' electronic money. (Safeguards kick in pretty quickly.)
Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.
> they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
When the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, funds were only inaccessible for 72 hours, and no depositors lost any money [0]. Which is still not ideal, but most people will never experience a bank collapse, and there are plenty of banking activities that will take longer than 72 hours to process in regular circumstances anyways.
Indeed; most personal banking customers can fall back on FDIC insurance ($250k should be more than enough to cover your emergency fund). This isn't the 1920s.
Alas, for Silicon Valley Bank they went with 'too big to fail' and also covered uninsured deposits. That's moral hazard and endangers the core purpose of the insurance.
Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.
Well, insurance should only covered insured deposits.
> [...] so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, [...]
On paper, FDIC might be independent and have its own balance sheets. But in practice and given politics, FDIC itself can't fail / isn't allowed to fail. It'll always be bailed out, and that's what the market expects.
For the stability of the economy, it would have been better not to make uninsured depositors whole.
It sure isn’t the 1920s, it’s the 2020s so things like digital money are ephemeral and whimsical.
The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin?
In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?
What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?
It’s kind of neat to think about what will happen in this sort of scenario. I wonder how long the data centres will keep running, churning out models that don’t have a market an aren’t quite good enough for AGI.
A glitch prevented her account from being displayed for a few days, then was resolved. Your money, when covered via FDIC/SIPC and federal regulations, doesn’t just “disappear”.
FDIC usually doesn't protect against attacks on individual depositors. Fraud, scams, and theft for instance arent covered. If your bank just steals it FDIC usually won't be for that.
Deposit insurance coverage protects depositors against the failure of an insured bank; it does not protect against losses due to theft or fraud, which are addressed by other laws
And that's why I said federal regulations. FDIC covers failure of your regular savings, SIPC for brokerages, and the myriad of federal regulations (Reg E, Reg CC, OCC/Federal Reserve, CFPB) covers these edge cases.
I don't know that I'd call it clickbait, that's underselling it a bit. If you can call your bank and they flat out pretend you don't even exist, that you are not a customer, or whatever -- that's more than just a display error. Her accounts weren't even visible to bank staff. That's a pretty significant error.
Paper statements are now opt-in most places, so most people won’t have local copies of the records anymore. It’s extremely important, because there is no duty for a company to provide historic data. None of my banks provide detailed data back more than a couple of years.
That is a good point and at the very least it’s a good idea to download electronic statements, maybe with a script to retain the most recent n statements
Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.
My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
> Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
Yep. If they had implemented it just like the mail, they'd just email me the PDF (encrypted if necessary). But they don't, so I don't ever agree to "go electronic statements".
Sorry but this is rich. The vast, vast majority of times that Github goes down, even though the issue is almost always resolved within the day if not in the next couple of hours. Yet we'd all agree that "Github is down" posts are worth their time on HN, even though everyone knows how to access to status API, because it's not so much about being notified about the outage but understanding why it happened.
What exactly is "clickbait" here? Is the disappearance "mysterious" or not here? I'm not a banking tech engineer, so I don't have the slightest clue how a bank's app could completely glitch out for days about something as critical to people as their life savings. Were you even aware that this is something that could just happen? Do you have a notion that this issue would have resolved itself without the aggressive petitioning by the account holder? Explain to us how you would go to the FDIC with a claim when the FDIC covers customers with provable losses, and the article reports that this person was so ghosted out of the system that Fidelity's customer support was telling her, “Are you sure you shouldn’t be calling Schwab”?
From the article:
> Ms. Gruntmane felt she had little choice, and was forced to cancel her 20 or so patients for the day. After a quick stop at home to retrieve her personal computer, identification and other records, she got back into her car and started driving. “It just felt out of, like, a psychological thriller,” she said.
> As she was driving through Vail, she called her mother, who suggested trying to reach Fidelity’s fraud department one more time. She pulled over, and finally reached a rep who was more helpful. He also couldn’t immediately find any evidence of her accounts, but she had found one account number to share with him. After a second hourlong call, he promised they would continue to investigate, but said it was most likely a systems-related issue.
Explain to me how this isn't of interest to people who touch online systems? Is there a status.fidelity.com that we have access to, that you could point out how systemic or non-systemic this kind of incident is?
> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days
...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.
Think about how comfortable you would be with such a "glitch" preventing you from having access to any of the money in your main spending account? One day? One week? A month? How about a year, with court battles?
If you get uncomfortable at a month or a year, remember that the only difference between you and some other people is one of magnitude. Some people can't wait two weeks or even a week for financial institutions to get their shit together and fix their "glitches". This can upend their entire life and needs to be treated with the appropriate seriousness.
If it is a week, a month, or a year, those are all different levels of seriousness, and I'd expect it to be handled differently. If she has damages, she's welcome to sue the bank for recourse.
As an aside it's always a good idea to have a level of resiliency built into your life and avoid single points of failure. Accounts at two different banks, access to credit via credit card (even if you don't carry a balance), etc. Just like with planning for a disaster, while it's infeasible to store food for a year in an apartment, not having 3 days of food and water stored to cover an emergency is also risky: the same planning should extend to financial matters.
It was a glitch that was a little more that "prevented her account from being displayed". The reps could not see it ever existed. Meaning the backend really snafued.
But there was more than likely post mortems and days of meetings over it. Since it sounds it was a edge case upon edge case they didn't plan for.
>When she called on Monday, she received some more clues on what went wrong: Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
And it's a glitch that the 'average' person will probably never somehow trigger in their life. The amount of overlap required to trigger this issue is such an edge case. Apparently Fidelity's systems went wild after realizing the same person had both a TIN and a SSN and multiple overlapping accounts somewhere.
> Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
I think it's time to revise HN guidelines, when the original title is clearly intentionally misleading/clickbait/omitting key facts ("temporarily disappeared in this case). Editorializing to fix that should be encouraged, not just allowed.
https://archive.ph/xeMtb
> “There was no warning that I would not be able to access my accounts for five days,” she added. “If I had to use that money, it was completely inaccessible.”
A good reminder that your emergency fund should be held in cash at a bank, not in shares a brokerage. Not that a glitch like this couldn’t block access to your bank account too, but rather that the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
Something like Fidelity's Cash Management Account (has a debit card, automatically liquidates money market funds to cover spending) works fine as an emergency fund. But you need your emergency fund in two separate accounts at two different financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.
This is not merely a theoretical risk. Patelco (a Bay Area credit union with half a million members) got hit with ransomware back in 2024 that disrupted banking services for two weeks.
You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.
As a good friend, if I know that you are good for the money, I'd happily spot you even a few tens of thousands for a few days or weeks. (I'm actually more reluctant to do that with some family members, because I might be less likely to get the money back.)
Yep, another reminder that community is what makes you resilient. Not to say you shouldn’t personally prepare, but building up your community is preparation. It’s not only about stockpiling for yourself.
[dead]
I find a T-bill ladder works best for me. I keep half my emergency savings in 4 week bills. Given that my emergency savings is intended to sustain me for months, I can easily access the back half of my savings over the course of 4 weeks as each bill expires, returning another 12.5% of my emergency savings to me.
And in a worst case scenario where I can’t access the front half of my savings due to a bank run or other failure, I am only a week or so away from getting access to some part of my savings.
T-bills are highly liquid. You can sell them before they mature for very low transaction cost and get back their true market value, including the accrued interest, meaning there’s not much monetary benefit to staggering them week by week. You could just as well only roll them once a month and dip in freely if you need the cash.
If you have the capability and discipline to perform a T-bill ladder, you've gotta understand that you're not the person who general financial advice is targeted to. Being deliberately vague, but I've lost nontrivial amounts of money simply because I got distracted when doing a critical financial task and only remembered to get back to it months later. I think I can safely speculate that the story in the source article would never happen to you because you could easily locate the right account numbers if you found yourself locked out of a financial webapp.
I appreciate the vote of confidence but to be clear I just set it up on auto-reinvest for 24 months. There’s an initial setup every two years but the rest is mindless.
Maybe you’re right though. I maintain a non-trivial amount of data in my password manager to ensure I always have a centralized place to begin the hunt for information.
> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
That doesn't seem relevant here. The account disappeared due to a data maintenance error; it wasn't extracted via a legitimate transfer to another account, they literally forgot about it.
Yes, that is why I caveated my comment. But her quote is still a good reason to point out that if there is a chance you might need access to money within short notice (I’d say within a month), it should be in a checking or savings account.
As a "public service announcement," avoid using Zelle as transactions performed with it are not reversible.
Safety deposit box as a 2nd backup maybe? ;)
I know you're joking, but safety deposit boxes aren't nearly as safe as you think they are. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...)
Not totally joking after some thought. If the problem that a person experienced is "complete loss of bank account" then having a physical backup - not at a bank! - would help to cater to that scenario.
And yeah, looks like that's not a foolproof solution either. 3rd backup option might be needed... :D
Friendly reminder that banks are not a reliable place to keep emergency funds, they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
Which is the way it's supposed to work. You keep enough for daily transactions, because the expectation of multiple large scale withdrawals happening either in short succession or simultaneously is the most unlikely scenario to happen during operation. A bank keeps records of every account's value, but at any given time only has enough cash to cover one fifth of all of the money it has on record to be in those accounts. In other words, the bank's physically only got 20% of the money it has on the books. It has to work this way because there's no way a bank could hold all of the money it's customers are said to have, either because of physical space constraints or because there's literally not enough money in existence to cut it out of circulation without creating ridiculous deflation. The change away from the gold standard changed this quite a bit, and so has digital banking, but the numbers in your account are still backed by something that tangibly exists.
> the numbers in your account are still backed by something that tangibly exists
Only if you consider fiat money that can be printed in arbitrary amounts by Mr. Bernanke's famous printing press to be "something that tangibly exists".
Well there's also assets. The bank can hold the value of land deeds or house loans for example. The house and the land it's on are tangible things that can be evaluated. Though I suppose that's a degree removed from printed bills or minted coinage.
> I suppose that's a degree removed from printed bills or minted coinage
Yes, because the "value" of those assets is just a guess until you try to sell them. It might be a highly educated guess, but it's still a guess. And the time the bank would need to sell them--because it needs more cash due to an unusually high demand for cash withdrawals--is precisely the time that your educated guesses all go out the window: you're selling not because you're making a trade to improve your rate of return, but because you need cash, now, and buyers will know that and will gouge you on the price.
Despite that, USD seems to hold its value pretty well. Certainly a lot better than many other "stores of value."
> USD seems to hold its value pretty well.
The Consumer Price Index has inflated by a factor of more than 15 from January 1947 through March 2026 [1]. That's an annual rate of inflation of about 3.45 percent. That's an indication of how the USD does not hold its value--if you have a stock of dollars that you want to hold the same buying power year to year, you have to add 3.45 percent to it every year just to stay even.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Ok, great. Now list something what that's actually held its value.
A nice, mostly-even 3% a year is spectacular. Gold can't do that. Bitcoin can't do that. Only a central bank can do that.
> Now list something what that's actually held its value.
Gee, I dunno, anything whose value as measured in dollars increases by more than 3.45% a year? Like, just off the top of my head, stocks, bonds, real estate, and yes, gold. Bitcoin, maybe.
> A nice, mostly-even 3% a year is spectacular.
I don't think you understand that that 3.45% a year is not a rate of appreciation, as if dollars were an asset. It's a cost that you have to bear every year if you insist on holding dollars instead of something that, um, holds its value. In other words, it's a rate of loss of value of dollars.
> Only a central bank can do that.
If you mean that only a central bank, as an agent of a government, can force people to use money that loses value every year as the central bank prints more, yes, that's quite true. But it doesn't mean what you appear to think it means.
Why would that be necessary? For most people, liquid funds are something that's electronic anyway, and in most countries banks can't run out of customers' electronic money. (Safeguards kick in pretty quickly.)
Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.
You can be locked out of all your accounts simultaneously by a court order, for one.
There is no one reliable place. You must hedge with diverse custodial and non custodial forms of store of value for best assurance.
Hedging with friends and families is probably a good idea.
> they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
When the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, funds were only inaccessible for 72 hours, and no depositors lost any money [0]. Which is still not ideal, but most people will never experience a bank collapse, and there are plenty of banking activities that will take longer than 72 hours to process in regular circumstances anyways.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...
Indeed; most personal banking customers can fall back on FDIC insurance ($250k should be more than enough to cover your emergency fund). This isn't the 1920s.
Alas, for Silicon Valley Bank they went with 'too big to fail' and also covered uninsured deposits. That's moral hazard and endangers the core purpose of the insurance.
Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.
Well, insurance should only covered insured deposits.
> [...] so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, [...]
On paper, FDIC might be independent and have its own balance sheets. But in practice and given politics, FDIC itself can't fail / isn't allowed to fail. It'll always be bailed out, and that's what the market expects.
For the stability of the economy, it would have been better not to make uninsured depositors whole.
It sure isn’t the 1920s, it’s the 2020s so things like digital money are ephemeral and whimsical.
The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin?
In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?
What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?
It’s kind of neat to think about what will happen in this sort of scenario. I wonder how long the data centres will keep running, churning out models that don’t have a market an aren’t quite good enough for AGI.
[dead]
What do you recommend instead?
Mayonnaise jar buried in the backyard.
Do I have to clean out the mayo first? I am wondering if it will fester, or if most of the smelly decomposing microbes are aerobic?
Are we talking paper money? A bitcoin wallet? Trump dollar coins?
What about bitcoin
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/your-money/fidelity-inves...
NYTimes with the clickbait title.
A glitch prevented her account from being displayed for a few days, then was resolved. Your money, when covered via FDIC/SIPC and federal regulations, doesn’t just “disappear”.
FDIC usually doesn't protect against attacks on individual depositors. Fraud, scams, and theft for instance arent covered. If your bank just steals it FDIC usually won't be for that.
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/brochures/d...And that's why I said federal regulations. FDIC covers failure of your regular savings, SIPC for brokerages, and the myriad of federal regulations (Reg E, Reg CC, OCC/Federal Reserve, CFPB) covers these edge cases.
I don't know that I'd call it clickbait, that's underselling it a bit. If you can call your bank and they flat out pretend you don't even exist, that you are not a customer, or whatever -- that's more than just a display error. Her accounts weren't even visible to bank staff. That's a pretty significant error.
That's why you save local copies of records (statements, etc.). "Computer says no" can be fought with "judge says yes".
Paper statements are now opt-in most places, so most people won’t have local copies of the records anymore. It’s extremely important, because there is no duty for a company to provide historic data. None of my banks provide detailed data back more than a couple of years.
That is a good point and at the very least it’s a good idea to download electronic statements, maybe with a script to retain the most recent n statements
Many banks don’t even provide bank books anymore.
The only physical thing I’ve got from my bank is an ATM card.
Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.
My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
> Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
Yep. If they had implemented it just like the mail, they'd just email me the PDF (encrypted if necessary). But they don't, so I don't ever agree to "go electronic statements".
One had a bank do that with a safe deposit box. They had no record of it.
Pretty much had to physically find it myself. Was the last time I let that happen…
The irony of this username being dropped or forgotten about by a large institution
Sorry but this is rich. The vast, vast majority of times that Github goes down, even though the issue is almost always resolved within the day if not in the next couple of hours. Yet we'd all agree that "Github is down" posts are worth their time on HN, even though everyone knows how to access to status API, because it's not so much about being notified about the outage but understanding why it happened.
What exactly is "clickbait" here? Is the disappearance "mysterious" or not here? I'm not a banking tech engineer, so I don't have the slightest clue how a bank's app could completely glitch out for days about something as critical to people as their life savings. Were you even aware that this is something that could just happen? Do you have a notion that this issue would have resolved itself without the aggressive petitioning by the account holder? Explain to us how you would go to the FDIC with a claim when the FDIC covers customers with provable losses, and the article reports that this person was so ghosted out of the system that Fidelity's customer support was telling her, “Are you sure you shouldn’t be calling Schwab”?
From the article:
> Ms. Gruntmane felt she had little choice, and was forced to cancel her 20 or so patients for the day. After a quick stop at home to retrieve her personal computer, identification and other records, she got back into her car and started driving. “It just felt out of, like, a psychological thriller,” she said.
> As she was driving through Vail, she called her mother, who suggested trying to reach Fidelity’s fraud department one more time. She pulled over, and finally reached a rep who was more helpful. He also couldn’t immediately find any evidence of her accounts, but she had found one account number to share with him. After a second hourlong call, he promised they would continue to investigate, but said it was most likely a systems-related issue.
Explain to me how this isn't of interest to people who touch online systems? Is there a status.fidelity.com that we have access to, that you could point out how systemic or non-systemic this kind of incident is?
> Yet we'd all agree that "Github is down" posts are worth their time on HN
I don't. I flag them whenever I see them. They're annoying and not interesting or useful.
> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days
...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.
Think about how comfortable you would be with such a "glitch" preventing you from having access to any of the money in your main spending account? One day? One week? A month? How about a year, with court battles?
If you get uncomfortable at a month or a year, remember that the only difference between you and some other people is one of magnitude. Some people can't wait two weeks or even a week for financial institutions to get their shit together and fix their "glitches". This can upend their entire life and needs to be treated with the appropriate seriousness.
If it is a week, a month, or a year, those are all different levels of seriousness, and I'd expect it to be handled differently. If she has damages, she's welcome to sue the bank for recourse.
As an aside it's always a good idea to have a level of resiliency built into your life and avoid single points of failure. Accounts at two different banks, access to credit via credit card (even if you don't carry a balance), etc. Just like with planning for a disaster, while it's infeasible to store food for a year in an apartment, not having 3 days of food and water stored to cover an emergency is also risky: the same planning should extend to financial matters.
It was a glitch that was a little more that "prevented her account from being displayed". The reps could not see it ever existed. Meaning the backend really snafued.
But there was more than likely post mortems and days of meetings over it. Since it sounds it was a edge case upon edge case they didn't plan for.
>When she called on Monday, she received some more clues on what went wrong: Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
And it's a glitch that the 'average' person will probably never somehow trigger in their life. The amount of overlap required to trigger this issue is such an edge case. Apparently Fidelity's systems went wild after realizing the same person had both a TIN and a SSN and multiple overlapping accounts somewhere.
> Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
"The money you can't touch is the money you don't own".
If someone else can freeze, deny, censor, or condition your access to your money, then your "ownership" is incomplete, and definitely, not yours.
Never let cash go away. Never.
Can we update the title to append "and came back 5 days later" we don't need click bait titles on hn.
I think it's time to revise HN guidelines, when the original title is clearly intentionally misleading/clickbait/omitting key facts ("temporarily disappeared in this case). Editorializing to fix that should be encouraged, not just allowed.
Very much seconded
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