Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, launched an inquiry into a Federal Reserve data outage that lasted at least 48 hours around Aug. 5, 2026, and pressed the agency’s leadership on whether deep staffing cuts contributed to the disruption.
In a letter obtained by the committee, Warren said her office received reports of an outage affecting the Fed’s National Information Center, or NIC, which hosts critical data used for bank supervision, the discount window and other core functions.
“It is my understanding that around Wednesday, August 5, 2026, the NIC suffered an outage that lasted at least 48 hours,” Warren wrote. “It is important for Congress to understand the nature of this outage and its impact, if any, on the Fed’s critical functions; and how, if at all, your 30% staffing cuts in the Division of Supervision and Regulation affected the ability of Fed information technology staff to perform necessary maintenance of the NIC.”
Warren’s letter, addressed to Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman and other agency heads, sought specific answers about the incident. The inquiry asked whether the outage was a previously known IT issue, how and when the Fed became aware of it, and what delays occurred between the event’s start time, the agency’s awareness and the commencement of troubleshooting. She also requested identification of who led the response, how and when users were notified, and whether the Fed conducted retrospectives.
Additionally, Warren asked whether the Fed maintains a defined Recovery Time Objective for the NIC, what that threshold is, and whether past outages in the previous two years exceeded it.
The inquiry extended beyond the NIC disruption. Warren sent a separate letter to Bowman, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould and FDIC Chairman Travis Hill focusing on the broader impact of bank examiner workforce cuts. That correspondence raised questions about the agencies’ capabilities to oversee banks’ technology-focused third-party service providers, including artificial intelligence vendors.
The Senate Banking subcommittee has not yet scheduled a hearing on the matter.
