Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), apologized in the wake of the unusually long outage of the Chase online banking site, which affected 16.5 million users. The incident led to quite a bit of customer confusion and anger, prompting the bank to follow up with a memo on its Web site.

"We are sorry for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com, and we apologize for not communicating better with you during this issue. Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us," the bank said. "This was not the level of service we know you expect, and we will work hard to serve you better in the future and to communicate with you better if a situation like this should arise again."

Chase also promised to refund anyone who incurred late fees as a result of a delay in processing payments. "Online Bill Payments scheduled for September 13, 14 or 15 were processed by Wednesday night, September 15," the apology noted.

This is something of a wake-up call to the industry. There have been lots of glitches as of late, but as the complexity of online systems grows so do the continuous operations challenges. This cannot be allowed to happen again. Not too long ago we noted at least one bank linked top technology executives' pay to continuous operations. We may see more of that occur. Banks also need a detailed response strategy when outages do occur.

Related Articles:
Chase's handling of online bank glitch questioned
IBM embroiled in dispute over banking outage in Singapore
Glitch hits hand-held devices on NYSE floor