SIX Swiss Exchange has today experienced its worst outage for over 10 years, halting trading for three hours, The TRADE can reveal.
The outage began at 11 am CET when issues with equities and options trading surfaced. Trading was subsequently halted and did not re-commence until 2 pm CET.
A spokesperson for the exchange confirmed they had identified the root cause of the issue but that they would need a few more days to do a full post-mortem. They also confirmed that the venue had ruled out hacking as the cause.
“Once we were aware of the issue, we informed clients and the regulator in Switzerland,” head of media relations at SIX, Jürg Schneider, told The TRADE. “When we saw the recovery process which is usually one to one and a half hours could be started this was communicated to clients also.”
The outage is the worst the exchange has seen since 2012. Several similar events on other venues caused by technical glitches in recent years have sparked a renewed focus from regulators globally on what protocol should be when an outage takes place, particularly around what should happen to the closing auction.
Read more – ESMA publishes recommendations for trading venues in the event of a market outage
Nasdaq’s Nordic markets closed on 16 November last year without an auction after an outage. While, marketplaces of the European exchange operator, Euronext, also suffered a three-hour interruption to trading on 19 October 2020 that prevented the closing auction from successfully taking place.
Deutsche Börse experienced two separate outages during 2020 due to software glitches, the first lasting for four hours on its Frankfurt Stock Exchange in April, and the second lasting for three hours on 1 July on its trading platform Xetra.
Read more – EU watchdog raises concerns on third-party reliance after exchange outages in 2020
Outside of the EU, a software issue that coincided with the launch date for the upgraded ASX Trade system, provided by US exchange group Nasdaq, forced the ASX to shut down for four hours on 16 November.