The London Stock Exchange suffered yet another technical problem today. This time, it caused trading to be suspended for some 4 hours.
According to this morning story at the London Telegraph, trading was halted a few minutes after the market opened at 0800 London time. The market then reopened at 1215, this afternoon Telegraph story reports.
This is the second major problem with the LSE's new trading system since it was made officially operational on the 14th of February. The previous incident happened on the 15th of February. The Telegraph afternoon's article says that the LSE blamed the problem on a "real time data dissemination issue."
Traders were naturally irritated with this latest gaffe.
This is also the second time this week that LSE executive management was embarrassed by the poor performance of its trading operations. As the Telegraph notes:
"On Tuesday, Borsa Italiana, a unit of LSE, suspended trading for six-and-a-half hours because of a technical glitch a day after a day after the country’s benchmark FTSE MIB Index [see PDF on FTSE MIB Index here] plunged amid concern about unrest in Libya."
The technical glitch was attributed by Borsa Italiana as "a technical issue on DDMPlus, real time data feed service used by the majority of domestic operators."
The LSE is facing an official probe into the Borsa Italiana outage by Italian regulators. UK regulators may decide to start looking into the cause of today's outage as well.
The LSE apologized, of course, for the disruptions.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
