The Bank of England is investigating after its high value payments system went offline on Monday for around six hours.
Officials are trying to establish the root cause of the problem – but do not believe a cyber-attack is to blame at this stage.
The Bank described the outage of its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS (Clearing House Automated Payment System) as a “technical issue” which was resolved just after noon.
CHAPS is mainly used by banks and other financial institutions to settle high-value money market and foreign exchange transactions.
But it is also commonly used by solicitors and conveyancers to complete property transactions, as well by individuals to buy high-value items such as cars or to pay a deposit for a house.
On its website, the Bank of England describes RTGS and CHAPS as playing a “critical role in the UK economy and [which] support our mission of monetary and financial stability.”
RTGS and CHAPS process an estimated £1trn in transactions every day.
August is set to be the busiest month to move home, according to analysis collected by comparison site reallymoving.
An RTGS outage in 2014, which lasted for around nine hours, is estimated to have delayed the sales of about 700 properties, which were subsequently unable to complete that day as planned, according to a later report by the Bank.
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Dozens of people applied for compensation but the Bank ended up paying out only nine claims totalling just over £4,000.
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An investigation later concluded that the failure was caused by an IT glitch which followed “configuration changes” made during the previous weekend.
The Bank was unable to provide information on how many payments were affected by Monday’s outage.
Around 205,000 payments a day on average are made using CHAPS.
But a source said officials expected the “vast majority” to have been completed by the end of Monday.
