Her life savings mysteriously disappeared after a systems glitch

Q. I don’t understand how a systems update could delete all of my financial accounts and existence at Fidelity, with no meaningful explanation or apology. This experience has been and continues to be one of the worst of my life.

— Marta Gruntmane, Eagle, Colo.

Nobody thinks about the enormous amount of faith we put into the invisible infrastructure that continuously tracks and documents our financial accounts, until that one day when things go very wrong.

For Ms. Gruntmane, a 35-year-old physician assistant, that moment came on the Friday morning before Easter, as she was getting ready to take her daughter to school. Fidelity Investments sent messages alerting her that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile — and to contact Fidelity if she hadn’t done it.

Alarmed, she quickly logged in, “only to find that all of my accounts had disappeared and my balance showed zero dollars.”

It seemed that Fidelity had eliminated all traces of her longstanding financial relationship with it, erasing the tens of thousands of dollars she held in three accounts, including the Roth individual retirement account that her father had set up for her when she was 16 — and where she had made regular contributions ever since. Her online statements and tax documents had also vanished, so she couldn’t immediately find any of her account numbers, she said.