Mortgage and loan giant Mr. Cooper blames cyberattack for ongoing outage

Mortgage and loan giant Mr. Cooper says a “cybersecurity incident” earlier this week was the cause of an ongoing outage, adding that the company is “working to resolve the issue.”

The Texas-based company said in a statement on its website that on October 31, Mr. Cooper “became the target of a cyber security incident and took immediate steps to lock down our systems in order to keep your data safe.”

In a separate notice, Mr. Cooper said it is “actively investigating this event to determine if any data has been compromised.”

Mr. Cooper is a home loan, mortgage refinancing and debt collection giant with more than 4.1 million customers, according to its website, which appears to be largely down at the time of writing.

The company said in its statement that customers “will not incur any fees, penalties or negative credit reporting.”

Mr. Cooper initially described the incident as an “outage” in messages to customers that TechCrunch has seen.

It’s not clear when Mr. Cooper expects to bring its systems back to operation, or if the company has the technical ability to determine what customer data, if any, was stolen.

When reached by email, a spokesperson representing Mr. Cooper via a third-party public relations firm sent a boilerplate statement echoing the company’s public remarks and declined to answer our questions about the incident.

In a filing with federal regulators on Thursday, Mr. Cooper said it does not anticipate the cybersecurity incident having a material adverse effect on its business, operations or financial results.