A malfunction in a critical system at the European Central Bank (ECB) left more than three trillion euros up in the air for hours.
The Target 2 (T2) system settles $3.12 trillion in payments from businesses and consumers, as well as investment trades. The ECB stated that a “hardware defect” in T2 caused a system-wide outage, clarifying that the incident was not the result of nefarious activities.
According to Reuters, the disruption lasted roughly seven hours, but a person familiar with the breakdown suggested the system could remain in disarray for days. In a statement, the ECB said T2 was functioning normally again, but all deadlines for settling the day’s payment flows had been postponed for several hours.
Uncertain Ramifications
Though the outage has been resolved, the ramifications of the event are still unclear. The ECB is one of the world’s leading central banks, and this disruption raises questions about the infrastructure supporting it.
A spokesperson for Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, told Reuters that the outage meant paychecks, pension payments, and government assistance transfers were delayed and could take several more hours to arrive.
A similar scenario was reported by Deutsche Boerse’s Clearstream, which processes roughly 500,000 securities trades per day.
A Series of Outages
The issues at the ECB follow a series of service outages at major British financial institutions earlier this month that caused payment delays for hundreds of customers. In one incident, the Lloyds and Halifax banking apps were down for hours, preventing customers from transferring funds and accessing mobile and online banking.
There was a separate interruption at Barclays, where over 600 customers reported failed payments and incorrect account balances. While no reason was provided for the outages in any of these cases, no malicious activity was suspected either.
These incidents drew comparisons to the CrowdStrike outage, where a software glitch led to the largest internet outage in history. Though the ECB and UK bank outages are nowhere near that level, there’s been increased speculation that banks are struggling to keep up with the evolving technologies they depend on for critical functions.
