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Australian exchange says Monday's outage due to "unprecedented" hardware problem

Xinhua, September 23, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) said Monday's trading disruption dubbed the worst since its October 2011 outage had occurred due to a complex computer hardware problem.

In a statement on Friday, ASX chief Dominic Stevens had labelled Monday's trading glitch as an "unprecedented" hardware failure which led to a late start and an earlier close.

"The outage to ASX trade last Monday was unacceptable to the market and unacceptable to ASX. I again offer my apologies for the disruption caused," Stevens said.

"Our first priority was to ensure the market functioned normally and reliably when we reopened on Tuesday morning. This was achieved and it has operated without issue since," he said.

The ASX said its disaster recovery system (DRS) was last tested on July 27.

"An unprecedented hardware malfunction triggered a complete database failover to DRS and not all parts of ASX trade successfully connected to the DRS database," ASX said in a statement.

Monday's outage was a great let down and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has since said that it was investigating the matter, while the Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, has described the failure as "a very unfortunate incident."

Meanwhile, ASX rival Chi-X Australia has accused the former of unnecessarily trapping billions of dollars of market liquidity during the outage by locking up open orders.

That's because the ASX had placed the market on an "enquire" mode which means orders cannot be amended or cancelled, a decision that the exchange defended and said was made in accordance with its procedures.

Chi-X believes the ASX could have utilized "adjust" mode instead, where orders can be cancelled and eventually executed on Chi-X without incurring any risk.

Stevens on the other hand has said that the index decision to close the market earlier was not made lightly.

"Understandably, concerns have been raised on various fronts," Stevens said.

"However, we make no apologies for following our long-established and well understood protocols nor for exercising our judgement to ensure the market was fair, orderly and transparent."

"That is ASX's responsibility," he said. Enditem