European Central Bank's payment system suffers second outage in a week

The European Central Bank's payment system on Monday suffered a second, short outage in the space of a week due to a glitch caused by a software update.

The T2 system, which handles trillions of euros of daily transactions, was down for roughly 40 minutes in the early hours on Monday, delaying settlements in the single currency and in Danish crowns, the ECB said on its website.

A treasurer at a top euro zone bank said some delays were still reported at the start of the business day on Monday but the issue had since been resolved.

A similar incident occurred in the early hours of June 29.

A spokesperson for the ECB said both outages were caused by a recent software update, which had "introduced an issue that has now been addressed". He added systems were operating normally.

A hardware failure caused T2 to suffer a seven-hour outage last year, which delayed salaries and welfare payments for thousands of people in the euro zone, as well as some transactions on financial markets.

-Reporting by Francesco Canepa in Frankfurt and Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Alexandra Hudson/Reuters