A hardware failure in the main database used by the Australian Securities Exchange’s equities trading system, ASX Trade, has been blamed for a late open and early end to trading yesterday afternoon.
The ASX’s managing director and CEO, Dominic Stevens, said in a statement that the failure “had a number of knock-on consequences that affected the operation of the market.”
“These included a delay to the market open and the decision to close the market early due to ongoing issues that impacted the proper functioning of the trading platform,” he said.
“The issues were not in any way related to cyber security. ASX is now focused on ensuring that the market re-opens on schedule.”
The ASX posted a message on its website this morning indicating that the markets will operate as normal today. The organisation said participants had been able to connect since 2:25am this morning and all systems are performing as expected.
Participants are able to complete their normal recovery process and query their firm order book (MQ151 Query) from the time they connect, the ASX said. They will be also be able to query all trades from the previous trading day using a CQ111 query. For further information please refer to section 4.8, paragraph 8 on page 25 of the ASX Open Interface Manual.
The ASX said it can provide, on request, a file with ASX last trade prices for trade date 19 September.
Stevens said what happened yesterday did not meet the high standards of operations and system reliability that the ASX sets itself “and that customers should rightly expect of us.”
“Today, I will be speaking to customers to apologise, and to discuss what learnings we can draw to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.
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