Bank of America's website continued to suffer sporadic outages on Monday, marking the fourth day that some customers have been unable to use its online services to check balances and pay bills.

"We're sorry, but some of our pages are temporarily unavailable," a note posted to the homepage for the biggest US bank read. "Thanks for your patience." The advisory, and sporadic outages, have greeted many people trying to use bankofamerica.com since Friday.

Bank of America spokeswoman Tara Burke declined to discuss the underlying cause of the outages except to say it isn't related to hacking, denial-of-service attacks, or other incidents related to security.

"The majority of our customers are able to bank online," she said. "There's no compromised customer information."

Friday's disruption came the same day that BofA said it would begin charging customers $5 per month for purchases billed to their debit card. The fee set off howls of protests and led to unsupported rumors the unavailable webpages were the result of DoS attacks intended to punish the bank for imposing the new fee.

Burke said the access problems are a result of the bank taking measures to manage traffic volume during peak use. ®