European Central Bank: Swift Outage Affected Real-Time Gross Settlement System

The outage at Swift that affected the Bank of England also impacted the European Central Bank.

The outage, which lasted for several hours on Thursday (July 18), disrupted high-value transactions across Europe, the Financial Times (FT) reported Thursday.

The European Central Bank said its settlements system was affected by the Swift outage, according to the report.

Swift’s problem caused less trouble for the European Central Bank than for the Bank of England because eurozone banks are less likely than U.K. ones to rely on the system, per the report.

In an operational status page on its website, the European Central Bank said that the cutoff times of some operations of its real-time gross settlement system (RTGS), T2, were delayed Thursday due to “the earlier issue impacting Swift.”

T2 settles payments related to the monetary policy operations of the Eurosystem and bank-to-bank and commercial transactions, according to the bank’s website.

Swift posted an operational update on Thursday that said that all Swift services were operating as normal after experiencing an operational incident that delayed the processing of services that it provides to some of its customers earlier in the day. It added that the incident “was not cyber-related.”

“We are in contact with our customers to support them in mitigating the adverse consequences on their operations and in turn on their own customers’ transactions,” Swift said in the update. “Swift takes any operational incident extremely seriously, is conducting a full investigation and apologizes for the disruption caused.”

As PYMNTS reported earlier Thursday, the Bank of England said that a global payments issue had been resolved after affecting the United Kingdom’s high-value payment system, CHAPS, and delaying house purchases and other high-value and time-sensitive payments.

The bank added that retail payments systems for cash points, card payments and bank transfers were unaffected by the payments issue.

“We are pleased to confirm that the third-party supplier has restored service following their earlier issues, and CHAPS payments are settling as normal,” the Bank of England said in a Thursday press release. “We expected that all payments received by the bank today will be settled by the end of the day.”

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