Nubank customers received an erroneous message Friday that the lender had been liquidated by Brazil’s central bank, resulting from “an isolated operational error.”
The Brazilian digital bank identified and resolved the error that same day. All of Nubank’s licenses remain active, and operations are running “securely and stably,” the bank said.
Dozens of customers in Brazil had received the liquidation message earlier, Reuters reported.
“Really bizarre, but that’s exactly what it was: an operational error,” Nubank co-founder Cristina Junqueira wrote Friday in an Instagram comment seen by Bloomberg. A developer accidentally triggered a protocol that disseminated the message, she said.
“I just received an email from @nubank itself saying that it has entered extrajudicial liquidation,” one customer wrote on social media site X, in a post translated from Portuguese to English. “Then I go into the app and there it is, saying the same thing. Telling me to activate the [deposit insurance] to withdraw my investment. WTF is this????”
Nubank publicly apologized to customers in a statement following the incident, and it “reaffirmed [its] commitment” to quality and transparency. Nu Holdings, Nubank’s publicly traded parent company, was founded in 2013 and is worth over $60 billion.
Nubank has had a busy June, naming two new members to the C-suite – longtime Visa vet Rob Livingston as CFO and former Microsoft executive John Walton as chief information security officer.
Nubank received a conditional U.S. bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller in January, at the time saying it would “focus on fully capitalizing the institution within 12 months and opening the bank within 18 months.”
