A complete failure of all payment transactions within the Target2 system was experienced for several hours on Friday, with backup systems and contingency modules also initially unable to function.
In a status update posted Sunday, the ECB states that “due to an internal issue affecting the Target2 infrastructure, all settlement services became unavailable from approximately 14:40 CET.”
“As a consequence, no payment, ancillary system instructions or liquidity transfers from/to TIPS and T2S could be processed for several hours. The ICM was also unavailable.”
With the backup system failing to boot up, it was necessary to move the production site from one region to the other to restore normal operations.
The failover was completed around 22:30 CET after which the ICM became available and settlement services were restarted. Friday’s processing window wasn’t closed until after 3:00am Saturday morning once the pending transactions had been processed.
An article by finanzSzene.de reports that there were still delays to Sepa instant payments being experienced during Monday morning.
The ECB update from Sunday states that a thorough analysis of the root-cause of the incident has been launched and the ECB has already excluded a “cyber-related incident.”
The ECB and Bundesbank have declined to comment on the cause of the outage, when Sepa payments will return to normal or why the failover nor contingency modules failed to operate.
UPDATE: The ECB posted an update at 7:00 CET Tuesday that the TARGET2 system is now operating normally. No further updates about the cause of the disruption have been provided.
