The SBA PPP Loan System Crashes Within Minutes Of Second Round Launch

On Saturday, Congress approved another $310 billion in Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program loans after the original $349 billion in funding ran out in just a matter of days.

The PPP lending program was scheduled to resume at 10:30 am ET on Monday, but the portal seems to be having issues handling the demand.

A source within the community banking business told Benzing the PPP system appears to be down nationwide. After placing a call to the SBA help desk, the source said the SBA system is down and they are unable to confirm loan numbers at this time, leaving bankers "on pins and needles."

CNBC's Dawn Giel tweeted that an industry source confirmed that the platform did open at 10:30 a.m. as planned, but was giving applicants an error message within four minutes.

According to an industry source, the @SBAgov E-Trans system used for #PPP loans is already running into issues. Platform opened up again at 10:30a ET today for the second round of $310B in funding for small businesses...the below error message apparently occurred 4 minutes later pic.twitter.com/no86V4cVCU

— Dawn Giel (@DawnGiel) April 27, 2020

Dozens of Twitter users confirmed receiving the same error message when trying to access the portal.

There are also unconfirmed reports of a handful of applications getting pushed through and approved between error messages.

More than $2 billion of the first round of #PaycheckProtectionProgram funding was either declined or returned and will be made available during the current application period.

— Jovita Carranza, SBA (@SBAJovita) April 27, 2020

Banks had warned applicants prior to the 10:30 am opening that the funding could once again run out quickly.

"The pacing mechanism prevents any one lender from submitting thousands of loans an hour into the ETran system. If a lender goes above the pacing limit they will get timed out." 2/2#PPPloans https://t.co/ebnTnham4e

— Kate Rogers (@katerogers) April 27, 2020

The Small Business Administration said “unprecedented demand” slowed e-Tran with more than 100,000 loans processed by more than 4,000 lenders as of 3:30 p.m. ET. CNBC's Kate Rogers reported that's "more than double the number of users accessing the system compared to any day during the initial round of the program."