Wells deals with tech issues for 2nd day, extends hours

NEW YORK (AP) -- The problems with Wells Fargo's online and mobile banking services, as well as its ATMs, lingered into a second day on Friday as the bank continues to recover from a possible fire at one of its data centers.

The San Francisco-based bank said Friday most of the disrupted services have been restored, but both the bank's employees and its customers had trouble accessing information on their direct deposits earlier in the day. The bank said that issue has now been corrected.

The bank will extend branch hours by one hour on Friday and Saturday to help customers deal with any issues they might have had during the outages, Wells Fargo said in a statement.

"While we restored operations throughout the day and continue to address customer concerns, our recovery from these issues was not as rapid as we or our customers would have expected," said Wells Fargo CEO and President Tim Sloan in a statement. "We will review the system issues in detail, and do all we can to ensure that this type of disruption doesn't happen again.

The problems started early Thursday when Wells Fargo said a smoke was reported at one of its data centers, which caused the bank to cut power automatically to the facility and reroute data through backup centers. However, the transition did not go as planned and customers complained that they were unable to access online and mobile banking, and some reported they were unable or restricted in their ability to withdraw cash.