“The European Central Bank blamed a software defect for a disruption to the region’s main wholesale payment system last week that left banks unable to process transactions and securities trades for almost 11 hours. The outage on Friday paralyzed the ECB’s Target2 payments system, which provides the plumbing that allows money to flow across the bloc’s single market. Owned and operated by the region’s central banks, it processes around €2 trillion in transactions a day, equivalent to $2.35 trillion and to around a fifth of the eurozone’s annual economic output. The “major incident” took place at about 2:40 p.m. on Friday, according to the ECB. After a backup system failed, commercial banks couldn’t process transactions through about 1:20 a.m. the following morning. While European businesses and individuals could continue to make payments, the money wasn’t landing where it should.”