The European Central Bank's said late on Thursday its systems for settling transactions were working again after an outage that had kept them offline for most of the day was fixed.
Both the ECB's Target 2 system for settling large payments between banks and the Target 2 Securities network dedicated to financial trades were "operating normally", the ECB said in updates on its website.
The ECB said in a statement to Reuters the unprecedented issue had been caused by a "hardware defect" and there was no "malicious (or) foul play".
"The Eurosystem (of euro zone central banks) is taking all measures necessary to resume normal operations as soon as possible," it said after repeatedly pushing back the cut-off time for submitting the day's transactions for settlement.
An emergency channel was still open for "very critical payments", the ECB said.
