Ireland's link to the European Union interbank payments system went down briefly today in what was the seventh system glitch in three months.
The European Central Bank said the Irish arm of the Target system malfunctioned early this morning but was working again by 7.02am. The fault was first notified at 5 am.
The disruption to Target, which handles large value interbank payments in euros, did not affect payments being made through other EU national central banks.
The ECB's link to Target went down briefly earlier this month and so far this year there have been short outages in The Netherlands, Italy and Greece, which suffered two in one day.
The failures did not cause significant market disruption, though a six-hour outage in Germany in January disturbed trading.
Target handles €1.7 trillion in real-time gross settlements on an average day. The ECB set up the system at the launch of the euro in 1999, and a replacement, Target 2, is scheduled for 2007.