Bank of England payment system hit by RTGS outage

The Bank of England's core payments systems were hit by an unexpected outage on Monday.

Both the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS (Clearing House Automated Payment System), two vital payments systems processing hundreds of billions of pounds in transactions, were affected by a "technical issue", according to a statement from the UK's central bank.

"This morning, we experienced a technical issue which prevented us from opening our real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS high value payments system. The issue has been resolved and settlement will resume shortly," the bank said.

The issue was resolved by the end of the working day, with all CHAPS payments submitted "settling normally".

"We do not anticipate that there will be any outstanding payments to settle when we close the system this evening," the bank added in a later statement.

The two systems, critical for the UK's banking and financial services vast infrastructure, are typically used by banks to send money to each other for high value transactions such as home sales.

The Bank of England gave no further details on the cause of the problem.