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House purchases and major UK and European payments were disrupted on Thursday after an outage at the Swift international network that lasted for several hours.

Payments via the Bank of England’s Chaps service, which is used in the UK for big wholesale transactions as well as retail transactions such as house purchases, resumed during the afternoon, the BoE said.

The outage had caused brief chaos in the UK’s housing market, which is reliant on the Chaps payment system for completions. Earlier on Thursday estate agent group Foxtons had said two law firms the agency works with had reported delays of at least four hours for funds to be transferred.

The European Central Bank also said it had delayed by one hour the closing of its settlements system because of an “earlier issue impacting Swift”.

Because fewer Eurozone banks rely on the Swift system, its problems caused less disruption for the ECB than it had at the Bank of England, according to one person briefed on the matter, who said the issue was having an impact around the world.

The US Clearing House said its Chips system, which does not use Swift, was not affected.

Swift started investigating the issue earlier in the morning, according to an update it published online.

In a statement released late on Thursday the company said the issue was an “operational incident delaying the processing of services” and had not been caused by a cyber attack.

Swift said it “takes any operational incident extremely seriously, is conducting a full investigation and apologises for the disruption caused.”

The UK’s Chaps system was hit by a computer crash in August last year that resulted in thousands of house purchases being delayed. About 4,000 home purchases complete daily in the UK on average, according to RBC.

The BoE initially flagged the issue just before 3pm, blaming a “global payments issue” and saying it was “working closely with a third party supplier, industry and other authorities to resolve the issue as promptly as possible”.

In an updated statement at 4.30pm the BoE said: “We are pleased to confirm that the third party supplier has restored service following their earlier issues, and Chaps payments are settling as normal. We expect that all payments received by the Bank today will be settled by the end of the day.”

Chaps is an automated payments clearing system that the Bank of England has managed since 2017. Its 35 direct participating banks are regulated by the Payments Systems Regulator.

Although Chaps payments only make up about 0.5 per cent of total payment volumes in the UK, their total value accounts for about 92 per cent of sterling payments.

Several thousands of financial institutions make Chaps payments through its direct participants. Last year, a record 51mn payments were processed on the system, which handled £363bn worth of transactions daily in June on average.

Additional reporting by Joshua Franklin in New York