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A recent outage at Swift affected the European Central Bank (ECB), causing disruptions in high-value transactions across Europe. The incident, which lasted several hours on Thursday, July 18, also impacted the Bank of England, according to the Financial Times (FT).
The ECB reported that its settlements system experienced disruptions due to the Swift outage. However, the impact on the ECB was less severe than on the Bank of England, as eurozone banks rely less heavily on the Swift system compared to their UK counterparts.
On its operational status page, the ECB noted that the cutoff times for some operations of its real-time gross settlement system (RTGS), T2, were delayed due to the issue with Swift. T2 facilitates payments related to the monetary policy operations of the Eurosystem, as well as bank-to-bank and commercial transactions.
Swift issued an operational update on Thursday, stating that all services were back to normal after an operational incident earlier in the day caused delays in processing services for some customers. Swift clarified 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. “Swift takes any operational incident extremely seriously, is conducting a full investigation, and apologizes for the disruption caused.”
Earlier on Thursday, PYMNTS reported that the Bank of England had resolved a global payments issue that affected the UK’s high-value payment system, CHAPS, delaying house purchases and other time-sensitive payments. Retail payment systems for cash points, card payments, and bank transfers were unaffected by the 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 press release. “We expect that all payments received by the bank today will be settled by the end of the day.”
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