The Bank of England has revealed disruption to some major financial transactions due to a “global payments issue”, later confirmed to have been fixed..

In a statement this afternoon, the Bank revealed that its high value CHAPS service – which handles payments worth hundreds of billions of pounds each day – was affected by an outage from late morning.

This resulted in delays to transactions between major commercial banks and some house purchases over a period of around four hours.

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It said in the latest statement: “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.

“If you are concerned about a CHAPS payment you plan to make or receive today, please contact your bank, or other payment service provider.”

It is understood the incident was not being treated as a potential cyber crime.

It did, however, primarily affect CHAPS – a sterling-based service that the Bank runs Monday to Friday from 6am to 6pm.

Retail payment systems, such as ATMs and card payments, were unaffected.

It was unclear how many transactions had been delayed.