The European Central Bank said late on Thursday it had fixed an unprecedented outage in its payment system which had left transactions likely worth trillions of euros from companies, consumers and investors up in the air for most of the day.

The European Central Bank's said late on Thursday its systems for settling transactions were working again after an outage that had kept them offline for most of the day was fixed.

By Tom Sims, Francesco Canepa and John O'Donnell FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Banks struggled to process payments on Friday after an unprecedented day-long breakdown in the European Central Bank's machine underpinning trillions of euros of money movements.