Aug. 28--HSBC Bank USA confirmed Wednesday that its computer crash this month was caused by bad hardware related to its disk storage, answering a key question that many customers and observers have posed.

"We have now determined the root cause of our recent system incident," said a statement from spokeswoman Linda Recupero. "It occurred during an upgrade of our disk storage system."

She said the bank is "working with our hardware vendor to make every effort to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future."

Recupero would not elaborate on the nature of the problem or identify the vendor, however, saying the bank is focused on its customers first.

The U. S. banking subsidiary of London-based HSBC Holdings Plc experienced significant problems after its core banking computer system, located at its Amherst data center, crashed Aug. 15. The computer failure prevented customers from checking their balances or accessing large amounts of money, and left the bank scrambling for the next week to catch up on transactions and bring account balances back up to date.

The systems are now up and running, although some data recovery still remains to be finished.

jepstein@buffnews.com

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