The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) closed its market over an hour early on Monday after experiencing software issues on its ASX Trade platform for equities and derivatives.
According to a notice published by the exchange, ASX Trade failed to disseminate trade confirmation messages between 14.18 and 14.48 Australian time. All impacted trade executions were delivered to market participants after normal market close and will remain valid.
ASX decided not to reopen the market for the rest of the day while the issue was investigated. The problem was due to the generation of duplicate internal series identification numbers, which impacted a component of the ASX Trade system and halted the dissemination of trade confirmations. The market opened and closed as normal on Tuesday.
The exchange launched ASX Trade in December last year. The platform is powered by exchange group Nasdaq OMX's Genium INET technology and offers latency of 300 microseconds and a capacity of 100,000 orders per second.
The ASX glitch follows a series of other outages that have hit European exchanges over the last week. On 22 February, Borsa Italiana, the domestic Italian stock exchange owned by the London Stock Exchange (LSE), suspended trading for six hours following technical problems that affected its data dissemination service. Last Friday, the LSE's UK cash markets suffered a four-hour shutdown again following data dissemination issues.
The ASX is currently awaiting regulatory approval to merge with the Singapore Exchange, in a deal that would create an exchange group with a market capitalisation of US$12.3 billion.