Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, announced Thursday that the bank will hire a big auditing company to look into an outage that occurred in its payment system last month and caused thousands of users to experience delays in payments and financial transactions.
Laptops 1000On February 28, a major outage occurred in the ECB’s Target payment system due to a piece of failing hardware, which was exacerbated by an early incorrect diagnosis of database problems.
The four central banks that control Target—Germany, Italy, France, and Spain—are investigating why it took so long to detect the issue and why backup systems did not activate immediately.
Lagarde informed European legislators during a session that “the supervisor, which is one of the big auditing firms and which has the duty to do that, is also going to be brought into the investigation.”
The firm was not named by her.
After a previous investigation by Deloitte into a series of failures in 2020, the ECB redesigned Target, specifically its crisis management system.
The issue was described by Lagarde as “an issue of standing and reputation” for the ECB.
“We need to be totally transparent as to what it is and how we fix it so it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
