Zelle Outage Disrupts Payments Nationwide, Service Slowly Coming Back Online

A massive Zelle outage hit users across the country on May 2, 2025, leaving thousands unable to send or receive money. The problems started early, around 6 a.m. ET, and quickly spiraled into a full-blown crisis.

By midday, over 800 people had reported issues on Down Detector. Not great timing for people trying to pay rent.

The outage affected pretty much every major bank that uses Zelle—Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi. You name it, it was down. Users can typically send money using just a phone number or email through the service. Nobody knew if their money was actually going through or just floating in digital limbo. Talk about stressful.

Turns out the problem wasn’t even Zelle’s direct fault. A Zelle spokesperson confirmed that some independent third-party provider messed up. Classic tech blame game.

The timing was particularly awkward since Zelle had just shut down its standalone app on April 1, forcing everyone to use bank-integrated systems. This transition was likely influenced by the fact that only 2% of transactions occurred through Zelle’s dedicated app anyway. Those systems chose today to fail spectacularly.

The impact? Real people with real problems. Landlords waiting for rent payments. Small businesses unable to process transactions. Regular folks just trying to split a dinner bill. Social media lit up with complaints. People were not happy.

Banks scrambled to respond, mostly with generic “we’re working on it” statements. They suggested contacting financial institutions directly—because everyone loves spending hours on hold with customer service.

Meanwhile, many users just gave up and switched to alternatives like Apple Pay, Venmo, or good old-fashioned cash.

By late evening, things started improving. The flood of outage reports slowed to a trickle. Some users reported successful transactions again. By 10 p.m. ET, outage reports had decreased to about 268 complaints. But many payments remained stuck in processing purgatory.

The incident highlights how dependent we’ve become on digital payment systems. When Zelle fails, people can’t pay bills, businesses lose income, and everyone gets a harsh reminder of our financial system’s fragility. The technical root cause was linked to an internal error at Fiserv, the third-party provider handling payment infrastructure for numerous affected banks.

As of May 3, Zelle and banking partners were still working to fully restore service. They promised everything would be back to normal soon. Whatever “normal” means these days.

Until then, maybe keep some cash handy. Just saying.