The Bank of Japan is investigating a problem with its website that prevented some market participants from accessing the central bank’s closely watched interest rate hike announcement on Wednesday.
In the minutes leading up to the 12:56 p.m. announcement, some people trying to access the BOJ website received a message saying it was temporarily unavailable due to “network congestion or other issues.”
It is not clear whether the website was made available to everyone at once or whether some market participants had access before others. The central bank is investigating the cause of the problem and has no further information at this time, a BOJ spokesman said.
The BOJ, unlike central banks in other major developed economies, does not set a fixed time for releasing monetary policy decisions. That leaves traders and anyone hoping to access the data in a bit of chaos, even without a website outage.
“People were frustrated,” said Shoki Omori, chief desk strategist at Mizuho Securities. “Traders were already certain about the rate hike because the results came very late — they just wanted the results quickly so they could adjust their positions. But they needed to see the communication and the website was down.”
The BOJ decided to raise its policy rate to 0.25% and announced plans to reduce the monthly pace of bond purchases to about ¥3 trillion ($19.6 billion) in the first quarter of 2026.
Website outages ahead of major government and central bank information releases are not unheard of, but rare. In the United States, local labor department websites were so overwhelmed by pandemic demand in 2020 that crashes and data issues impacted Labor Department figures.
