Glitch Hits London Stock Exchange

A software problem meant an outage for seven hours on Monday for the London Stock Exchange, to all intents and purposes eliminating a day's trading.

An outage on Monday meant that the London Stock Exchange was forced to cease trading for a little over seven hours on Monday.

It began a little after 9.15 in the morning, just 45 minutes after trading had begun, and wasn’t resolved until around 4.30 pm, meaning the to all intents and purposes the Stock Exchange lost a whole day’s trading. The problem was fixed and trading was normal yesterday, although the LSE didn’t give the reason for the problem.

A spokeswoman to 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 backup site."

The spokeswoman told the site that at 8.45 officials first noticed there was “insufficient connectivity” to the market at 8.45, and made the decision to suspend trading half an hour later.