Bank of America customers tossed offline

NEW YORK, N.Y. (AP) - Customers of Bank of America Corp. were again having problems accessing their accounts online Tuesday.

It was the second outage for the Charlotte, N.C., company in less than two months.

The latest outages, which began Monday and hadn't been resolved by early Tuesday evening, were the result of system upgrades over the weekend, said Tara Burke, a company spokeswoman. Burke declined to say whether the bank had anticipated that the upgrades would disrupt service. But she said no customer information was compromised.

"We hope to have it restored as quickly as possible," Burke said.

Bank of America, the country's largest bank, has 29 million online banking customers.

The company's online banking service last experienced outages Jan. 14 for almost an entire day. Bank of America said at the time that the problems were the result of routine system changes that were performed overnight. The site was also down for several hours in August as a result of what the bank called a "temporary system" issue.

Burke declined to say when the bank's next system maintenance would take place. But she noted that customers were still able to access account information through mobile banking and ATMs during the outages. She also noted that the service problems were not the result of hacking.

That has been a distant concern for some customers since the company said in December it would no longer handle payments for WikiLeaks, the secret-releasing organization. The bank's actions followed similar moves by MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.

Hacker groups that support WikiLeaks subsequently managed to disrupt the websites of some of those companies, but Bank of America's site did not show any signs of being affected.

Julian Assange, the driving force behind WikiLeaks, has said his organization plans to release information about banks this year. In particular, Assange has said his organization had a trove of files on Bank of America.