The London Stock Exchange (LSE) suffered another embarrassing outage on Thursday, the 26th of November. According to news reports and the LSE itself, at 1033 local time, a "connectivity issue" required the suspension of trading in all FTSE 100 Index stocks and order-driven securities. At 1400 local time, trading was able to resume.
LSE CEO Xavier Rolet was quoted as saying: "We regret the inconvenience that today's disruption to trading has caused for our clients. Having resolved the immediate issue, we are working hard to ensure this doesn't happen again ahead of switching to MillenniumIT's trading platform next year."
On the 9th of November, a server problem caused trading to be suspended in 1 out of every 12 stocks on the LSE; there was another but different problem that caused a short outage in October as well.
Last year, the LSE went down for seven hours.
In September, the LSE announced plans to replace its Tradelect core trading platform with one from Sri Lanka-based MillenniumIT, which it bought for £18 million. The LSE introduced Tradelect only two years ago after spending four years and £40 million on its development.
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.