European Central Bank publishes redacted post-mortem and 20-measure action plan following TARGET2 and T2S outage

The European Central Bank has published a redacted post-mortem report on the operational disruption that interrupted TARGET2 (T2) and TARGET2-Securities (T2S) payment and securities settlement processing for several hours on 27 February 2025, alongside a detailed 20-measure action plan to strengthen operational resilience. The incident was triggered by the simultaneous failure of a critical hardware component and its redundancy mechanism, requiring activation of business continuity arrangements and failover from the primary to the secondary site. The defective component was replaced in the days following the incident and the vendor rolled out an update addressing the identified weakness in the redundancy system. The action plan spans technical monitoring, business continuity, decision-making processes and communication practices, with several time-critical measures implemented immediately and the remainder on track for completion by the end of 2025. Key findings from the post-mortem will be integrated into the forthcoming annual external audit of T2S, which is already audited annually by a major international audit firm; the ECB also cited average service availability in 2020-2024 of 99.89% for T2, 99.99% for TIPS and 99.82% for T2S, above the 99.7% contractual objective. A redacted version of the report, excluding vendor-specific references, was made available to market participants and then published on the ECB’s website, and the ECB indicated it will continue providing regular updates to the European Parliament on these matters.