[suresk]

I don't this is an area of corporate law that has been super thoroughly tested? But I think the theory is -

Look, we had $X in our account on Wednesday and did a payroll run that was more than covered, but then our bank went under and the payments never got there. That's not our fault, nothing we can do about it!

But as time goes on and you're still employing people while having no bank account, you become more culpable for their unpaid wages after you find out you have no money.

The tricky thing here, I think, is that it still isn't very clear what is going to happen and it'd be silly to immediately fire a bunch of people because of it. There is a good chance some other bank acquires SVBs accounts and things are back to normal pretty quickly. If that doesn't happen, there is still a lot of money to go around, so you aren't losing 100% of what is in there.

I think there is a good argument that it is prudent and legally defensible to wait a day or two to figure out what is going on before you go nuts and shut the business down.