Entire Federal Reserve payment system CRASHES due to 'operational error' freezing $3trillion in daily transactions including paychecks, tax refunds and bill payments

• All Federal Reserve settlement services suffered disruptions on Wednesday
• The key banking systems were offline for more than three hours
• Fed says that the massive outage was caused by an 'operational error'
• Systems affected form the backbone of US banking and financial sector
• Fedwire is used by banks to transfer an average of $3.3 trillion every day
• FedACH handles smaller transactions such as paychecks and tax refunds