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House purchases and big UK and European transactions were disrupted on Thursday after an outage at the Swift international cross border payments system that lasted for several hours.

The Bank of England said a “global payments issue” affecting the central bank’s Chaps service, which is used in the UK for big wholesale transactions as well as retail ones such as house purchases, had delayed “some high value and time sensitive payments”.

The BoE later said payments via Chaps had resumed. The European Central Bank also said its settlements system had been affected by the Swift outage.

The outage caused brief chaos in the UK’s housing market, which is reliant on the Chaps service for completions.

Estate agent Foxtons said two law firms it works with had reported delays of at least four hours for funds to be transferred.

Swift, which facilitates cross-border payments between banks, said in a statement on Thursday that it experienced an “operational incident delaying the processing of services”, adding this was not 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 BoE initially flagged the Chaps service problem on Thursday afternoon, saying it was “working closely with a third-party supplier, industry and other authorities to resolve the issue as promptly as possible”.

The BoE later 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.”

The ECB said it had delayed by one hour the closing of its settlements system because of an “issue impacting Swift”.

With fewer Eurozone banks reliant on the Swift system compared to UK financial institutions, its problem caused less disruption for the ECB than the BoE, according to one person briefed on the matter, who said the issue was having an impact around the world.

The Chaps service is an automated payments clearing system the BoE has managed since 2017. Its 35 direct participating banks are supervised by the Payments Systems Regulator.

Payments via Chaps only make up about 0.5 per cent of total transaction volumes in the UK. But their total value accounts for about 92 per cent of sterling payments.

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

Chaps was hit by a computer crash in August last year resulting in thousands of house purchases being delayed.

Additional reporting by Joshua Franklin in New York

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Facebook owner Meta has explored a multibillion-euro investment in eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, as the social media platform intensifies its push to develop smart glasses.

The Silicon Valley company has considered taking a small stake in the €87bn Franco-Italian group, according to multiple people with knowledge of its thinking.

The move comes as Meta has been holding talks with EssilorLuxottica to deepen their existing collaboration following the successful launch of a revamped version of their “Ray-Ban Meta” smart glasses last year, some of the people said.

Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars in recent years to enter the wearable technology market, such as by creating virtual reality headsets. Meanwhile, Paris-listed EssilorLuxottica has also pushed for deals that can attract a new generation of shoppers.

There is no guarantee that any investment will take place, said the people close to the talks. Meta has been working with Morgan Stanley on the matter, according to one of the people.

EssilorLuxottica’s share price jumped nearly 5 per cent on Thursday following the FT’s report.

Meta, EssilorLuxottica and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

The first Ray-Ban Meta glasses were launched in 2021, but the newest generation launched in October last year sold more in a few months than the previous ones did in two years, EssilorLuxottica’s chief executive Francesco Milleri said at an event earlier this week.

The latest version of the glasses allows users to livestream what they see directly on to Facebook and Instagram. In the US, the glasses are integrated with Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant, giving owners the ability to ask the glasses for more information about what is in front of them.

This week, EssilorLuxottica agreed to buy US streetwear label Supreme for $1.5bn. People close to the deal said the eyewear group aimed to launch a new version of Supreme smart sunglasses in partnership with Meta, to better target young consumers.

Meta and rival Apple are vying to build unintrusive augmented reality glasses that could one day replace the smartphone as the next-generation computing device, but the technology is nascent and consumers have been reluctant to wear cumbersome devices on their face.

Zuckerberg said on an April earnings call that the company’s outlook for smart glasses had “improved quite a bit” and that it was one of the “bigger areas” that the company was investing into in its AR and virtual reality department, Reality Labs.

Previously, he had said glasses would need “full holographic displays to be a large market”, but that the success of the Meta Ray-Bans had proven otherwise.

“If we want everyone to be able to use wearable AI, I think eyewear is a bit different from phones or watches in that people are going to want very different designs,” he added. “So I think our approach of partnering with leading eyewear brands will help us serve more of the market.”

EssilorLuxottica, which was created seven years ago through a complex €50bn merger of late Italian billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio’s eyewear group Luxottica and French lens manufacturer Essilor, has steadily grown larger to become the world’s largest eyewear manufacturer.

Over the past few years, acquisitions of technology and engineering companies have been at the core of its strategy. In 2022 the group acquired Israeli hearing technology start-up Nuance Hearing to develop glasses fitted with its acoustic beamforming technology.

This week, EssilorLuxottica also took an 80 per cent stake in Heidelberg Engineering, a German company specialising in eye surgery technologies, as part of its push into medtech.