European Central Bank Faces Major Payment System Disruption

According to PANews, a significant malfunction in the European Central Bank's payment system last Thursday caused widespread disruption, affecting over 15,000 Greek welfare payments, numerous Austrian salaries and pensions, and several financial transactions. The chaos, which lasted for 10 hours, could have worsened if it had continued into the next day, the end of February, when many public sector employees, pensioners, and welfare recipients were due to be paid. This could have impacted millions of individuals and businesses, straining the banking system. Eurozone central bank officials identified a hardware failure as the root cause of the escalating turmoil. However, it took technicians several hours to pinpoint the issue after initially misdiagnosing a database problem. Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament and the committee overseeing the European Central Bank, stated, "A hardware failure is forgivable, but not having a backup that can be immediately activated in case of a problem is not." An ECB official noted that the affected hardware did have multiple backups, and the bank is currently investigating why they were not activated. Previously, it was reported that the European Central Bank plans to establish a blockchain-based payment system and is accelerating the development of a wholesale CBDC platform.