European Central Bank's glitch reduced bank deposits by EUR 400 bln

The interruption occurred on 23 October 2020 and lasted more than 11 hours. It meant large institutions were unable to move their cash in the usual way. The failure was illustrated in data published on 22 October 2020 by the ECB that shows a EUR 416 billion slump in the use of the deposit facility at the central bank.

The cash remained in banks’ current accounts, and the balances have since returned to normal. Still, the incident highlights the critical role of the payments infrastructure for the euro area, and the risks that could be posed from a longer outage.

The ECB said the disruption was due to the technical issues with TARGET2, which led to difficulties for banks and central banks to settle and determine the account balance. TARGET2 is used to process more than 2 billion euros of transactions per minute.