Three-week outage of some electronic systems at Highland Bank continues to disrupt

A nearly three-week disruption of Highland Bank’s electronic systems will cost “thousands of dollars,” the bank’s chief executive said.

CEO Rick Wall declined to say what caused the outage.

Over Labor Day weekend, the bank’s emails, phones and website stopped working, and the bank subsequently shut down the lobbies at its St. Michael headquarters and branches in St. Paul, Woodbury, Bloomington, Blaine, Ely, Maple Grove and Minnetonka.

Branch lobbies are now open, and phones and emails are working again, Wall said Thursday. However, the bank’s website remains down. Customers can still access their accounts online.

The bank hired a forensics team to address the data outage and started regaining use of some emails a few days after the outage was discovered on Sept. 3, he said.

Wall declined to give details about how much the outage is costing the bank, but he said its business interruption insurance has helped to defray the costs.

Customers have been minimally disrupted, the bank said. Besides being able to access accounts online, they still could conduct business at the bank’s drive-thru windows when lobbies were closed. The bank’s lobbies were shut down for the first three days of the outage.

Wall said the forensics team was still getting to the bottom of the cause.

“We were never out but had some limited outages inside the bank,” he said. “But many of those are resolved.”

The bank’s regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Minnesota Department of Commerce were immediately notified of the data outage and continue to be apprised of all progress, Wall said.

Business customers said they were initially concerned about not being able to enter bank lobbies but said they have been able to access their accounts and conduct business without trouble.

Highland Bank has $750 million in assets, $650 million in deposits and 115 employees in eight locations in the state. After acquiring Boundary Waters Bank in Ely, Woodbury and Blaine last year, it is the 25th-largest bank in Minnesota.