Churning Amex in Canada (2016)
 

It's been a long downtime today, of the MR systems.

During the XMAS break I was reading that some of our southern neighbours were unexpectedly seeing 2x-10x the balances on their MR accounts.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/american-express-membership-rewards/1732618-mr-usa-account-balance-suddenly-increased-2x-10x.html
and
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amex-loyalty-customers-get-accidental-points-windfall/

Around that time, I also noticed during an online Amex.ca session, that my MR account was "Temporarily unavailable". While it was not the first time I'd seen this message before, it did get me wondering if I would be faced with a moral dilemma. What would I do if my MR balance doubled or quadrupled?! But a few hours later the site was back up and all was normal and as it should be. Moral dilemma averted.

But today's outage seems to be fairly 'major'. Could they be reconciling to see who was naughty or nice? Or, perhaps they are patching up the holes which many have become endeared to? Guess we'll find out once the system comes back online.

<edit> disregard

^^^^^^^

That worked. Many, many thanks.

The "Benefits" tab on the Amex site has also not been working all day for me (tried multiple browsers and PCs). Instead I get the following page:

"Thank You for Visiting American Express

We're sorry. We are momentarily experiencing technical difficulties. We are working on bringing our services back online.
For immediate assistance, please call the number on your card or statement. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Thank you for visiting AmericanExpress.com. "

Anyone else having trouble with FH&R online?

I've been "naughty" like that before (though not with AMEX), but nothing has happened... so far. :P

Same here brah. Sad days.. :,(

Were you able to authorize a transfer -and- verify that it worked (if sending to a real time partner, such as AC, BA, DL, VS)?

that's more than me, it says I'm not allowed to access the FH&R site even though I a) am allowed to and b) have even made bookings on it before...... logging in on a different part of the website and then going to FH&R doesn't work either

I've been having some issues since the weekend. Just cannot log in to FHR - it accepts the credentials but doesn't log me in. The hotel I was looking at in Chicago went up in the meantime.

There's a good $100 off a $600 amextravel.com prepaid hotel booking until March so I'll keep trying.

Finally back up and running (at least for my account)

Not for me. :(

didn't call. I used your method (the one with direct link) and it worked. Transfer to Singapore was successful (at least points are deducted).

What I found strange that on my wife's account I could access transfer points page without direct link (via MR, travel, transfer points), but for my account it always gives a 'page not found'. I read here that most problems may be related to 2x-10x MR points mistakenly given by Amex, but our accounts were not affected by this. May be I should call Amex and ask what is going on.

strange - cannot load Amex chat in any browser. Pressing "Help" just gives me infinite loading icon where nothing happen.

works fine for me in Chrome.