The ECB was the first central bank in the world to react, and did so immediately, calming the markets, first, with a technical announcement via the relevant Reuters pages and, later in the course of the day, with the provision of unlimited central bank liquidity with overnight maturity at the prevailing policy rate.
The demand of banks turned out to be extraordinarily strong, totalling EUR95 billion. Over the next two days, further liquidity-providing fine-tuning operations were conducted, so that tensions in short-term euro area money markets abated to some extent.