PANews reported on March 6 that according to Jinshi, the European Central Bank's payment system had a major failure last Thursday. The chaos within 10 hours of discovering and solving the problem led to the obstruction of welfare payments for more than 15,000 Greeks, a large number of wages and pensions in Austria, and several financial transactions. The situation could have been worse. If the situation occurred or continued until the next day, the end of February, which was also the payday for many public sector employees, pensioners and welfare recipients, the chaos could hit millions of people and businesses and strain the banking system. According to eurozone central bank officials, the core of the escalating turmoil was a hardware failure, but it took technicians hours to discover the problem after an initial misdiagnosis of the database problem. Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament and a member of the committee that oversees the European Central Bank, said, "Hardware failures are forgivable, but not without backups that can be started immediately when problems occur." An ECB official said that the affected hardware did have multiple backups and the bank was analyzing why they were not started.

As previously reported, the ECB plans to establish a blockchain-based payment system and is accelerating the development of a wholesale CBDC platform .