Thousands of property purchases have been thrown into turmoil as the system used to transfer hundreds of billions of payments between lenders was hit by a technical glitch.
Home buyers and sellers were left unable to complete transactions yesterday afternoon after the Bank of England's Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) hit a glitch.
The Bank said it had paused computerised payments under its Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) payment system after identifying a "technical issue".
The system normally operates from 6am to 4pm on week days. It comes just over a year after the Bank was forced to operate back-up systems when RTGS suffered a hardware failure.
Today's glitch came after the system was re-started in the early hours of this morning after routine maintenance. It is reported to have followed a new bank being added to the system.
Manual payments settling balances between commercial banks worth billions of pounds - key to financial stability - were processed manually during the outage. Phil Kenworthy, managing director of CHAPS, said: "The problem was resolved mid-afternoon and, following an extension to the processing day, just under 143,000 payments were settled - in line with the normal average day's volumes."
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