BoE UK Payments System Disrupted, Delayed House Purchases Nationwide

• The Bank of England’s multi-billion pound payment system suffered a major outage on July 18, 2024.
• The outage is believed to have been caused by problems with SWIFT and has not affected the rest of the U.K.’s financial infrastructure.
• The disruption has been resolved and all payments are expected to be settled by the end of today.

The Bank of England (BoE) experienced a major outage in its high-value payment system that handles hundreds of billions in critical payments every day.

Though after some hours the problem has been resolved, many are taking this as an opportunity to remind legacy finance that technology called blockchain exists, and that this may have never happened if BoE used it.

Bank of England Outtage

In a statement on Thursday, July 18, the BoE announced  that its high-value CHAPS service, which managed payments worth hundreds of billions of pounds every day, suffered a temporary but significant outage.

For approximately four hours, transactions between major commercial banks and house purchases were delayed. The problem appeared not to be a fault of the BoE, but one with the international finance giant, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

It is unclear how many house purchases were delayed, or what impact this has had on affected entities. That said, approximately 4,000 housing transactions and around £350 billion  worth of high-value and time-critical transactions are processed each day by the CHAPS system. As per the BOE, the matter is now resolved, with no damage to the BoE’s infrastructure.

Other nations did not seem to be affected by the “problem” with SWIFT.

Switch to Blockchain

Crypto X was quick to tell  the Bank of England that Bitcoin (BTC) had not suffered such service interruptions and that this could have all been avoided if they had used public blockchains in their payments infrastructure.

Others have simply advocated  for blockchain-based payment firms such as Ripple or Chia, citing numerous efficiencies and lack of any downtime.

That’s not to say the crypto networks are immune from such failures, as we’ve seen with Solana. Furthermore, despite having a total uptime  of almost 99.99%, it has been down twice.

Bitcoin Downtime

The first occurrence was in 2010 during what was called “The Value Overflow Incident,” also known as CVE-2010-5139 , during which the Bitcoin network went down for 8 hours and 27 minutes.

In this event, a user had created a transaction of 184,467,440,737.09551616 BTC  for three different addresses, far exceeding Bitcoin’s 21 million token limit. As a result, Bitcoin’s network struggled to reach consensus as there was no check to ensure values so large could be sent. This bug was then ironed out by the mysterious Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, around 5 hours later.

It happened again in 2013  when there was a split in the Bitcoin blockchain. This which effectively resulted in two Bitcoin networks operating simultaneously, each with its own transaction history.

Lasting 6 hours, developers and miners were forced to call for a temporary halt to Bitcoin transactions and urged miners to downgrade to 0.7 until the matter was resolved.