The European Central Bank has escaped a payment system 'disaster', but exposed emergency response vulnerabilities

According to a report by Golden Ten, the European Central Bank experienced a major malfunction in its payment system last Thursday. The chaos that occurred within 10 hours of discovering and resolving the issue resulted in the suspension of welfare payments for over 15000 Greeks, large amounts of wages and pensions in Austria, and several financial transactions. The situation could have gotten worse. If the situation occurs or continues until the next day, the end of February, which is also the payday for many public sector employees, pension recipients, and welfare recipients, this chaos could hit millions of people and businesses, and strain the banking system. According to officials from the Eurozone central bank, the core of the escalating turmoil is a hardware malfunction, but it took several hours for technicians to discover the problem after initial misdiagnosis of the database issue. Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament and a member of the supervisory committee for the European Central Bank, said, "Hardware failures are forgivable, but without backups that can be immediately activated in case of problems, they cannot be forgiven." An European Central Bank official said that the affected hardware did have multiple backups, and the bank is analyzing why it did not start. Previously reported, the European Central Bank plans to establish a blockchain based payment system and is accelerating the development of a wholesale CBDC platform.