A JPMorgan office building is shown, Monday, May 14, 2012, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Bank spokesman Mike Fusco apologized for the inconvenience and said the technical glitch was resolved around 1 p.m. Friday, but he declined to discuss details of what exactly went wrong.
Bank officials said the outage affected 10 states: Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Connecticut, West Virginia, Delaware. It also hit the U.S. Virgin Islands.
"All customers can now use their SNAP, food stamps and other cash benefit cards after we resolved the technical issues," Fusco told The Associated Press.
Angry users took to social media to express their frustration in the busy grocery shopping days before Thanksgiving.
One woman tweeted, "They have about 50 signs on Publix door saying the (hash)EBT machine is down for Ga!!!"
"Five of these states were severely impacted by superstorm Sandy just weeks ago, causing significant hardship for many low-income families. We are deeply concerned about this outage and will continue monitoring the situation," said Kevin Concannon, an undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Some stores, including Wal-Mart, agreed to handle manual transactions to accommodate customers.
Fusco stressed the outage did not affect regular debit, credit or other card holders.
Hope no Obama voters had to go the entire six hours without so much as one energy drink.
You can't use your government issued EBT cards (read tax payer funded here), so you complain about it on social media?
That means you complained using your computer or smart phone to access your social media?
You can afford access resources to social media but you need tax funded assistance to buy food?
Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
Obama, congratulations for winning in 2012.