The Bank of Japan is investigating an issue with its website that prevented some market participants from accessing the central bank’s closely watched rate-hike announcement on Wednesday.
In the minutes leading up to the announcement’s release at 12:56 p.m., some people trying to access the BOJ website got a message saying that it was temporarily unavailable due to "network congestion or other issues.”
It’s not clear whether the website became available for everyone at the same time or if some market participants had access before others. The central bank is looking into the cause of the issue and has no further information at this time, according to a BOJ spokesperson.
The BOJ, unlike central banks of other major developed economies, doesn’t provide a set time for releasing monetary policy decisions. That leaves traders and anyone else hoping to access the data already in a bit of a scramble even without a website outage.
"People were frustrated,” said Shoki Omori, chief desk strategist at Mizuho Securities. "Traders were already feeling certain about the rate hike as the results were very late — they just wanted the result out quick so they can adjust positions. But they had to see the communication, and the website was down.”
The BOJ decided to raise its policy rate to 0.25% and unveiled plans to reduce its monthly pace of bond buying to around ¥3 trillion ($19.6 billion) by the first quarter of 2026.
Website outages ahead of key information releases from governments and central banks aren’t unheard of, but they are rare. In the United States in 2020, local labor department websites were so overwhelmed by demand during the pandemic that crashes and data issues impacted the numbers reported by the Labor Department.