Stock Exchange back to normal after outage

The London Stock Exchange is back to normal after an outage yesterday that ceased trading for the longest period in eight years.

The exchange said that the outage did not mean that its electronic trading system was in any way vulnerable to increased trading volumes, as some reports had suggested.

silicon.com Financial Services

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According to a spokeswoman from the exchange, the outage occurred after 45 minutes of normal operation at 09:15(BST) yesterday.

The outage was not fixed until 16:30(BST) yesterday afternoon, effectively wiping a full day's trading from the books.

The spokeswoman told silicon.com that the exchange, which switched to its digital trading platform TradElect in June 2007, is trading normally today after a fix was put in place. She said the problem had been identified but at time of writing the exchange had not revealed the reason behind the glitch.

According to the spokeswoman, the exchange noticed there was "insufficient connectivity" to the market as a whole at 08:45 and, as a result, it decided to suspend connectivity entirely at 09:15(BST).

A spokesman for the exchange told silicon.com: "It was a software issue relating to connectivity where two unpredictable events coincided and the fix now prevents these two things happening at the same time. As it is not a hardware issue, the outage was not related to volumes and that is the reason why we did not automatically switch to a back-up site."

The outage comes in an important month for the exchange. The platform was expected to begin to offer trades in Italian equities this month, made possible through the acquisition of Borse Italia in 2007.

This month was also the deadline for the platform to reach 10,000 continuous messages per second.