Australia’s top securities regulator has slammed the country’s national stock exchange over a four-hour outage that halted trading in futures markets.
The trading platform for the futures market ASX24 was shut down around 10:00 am due to a “hardware-related” issue. Power was not fully restored until 2 p.m.
The glitch came ahead of potentially market-moving February jobs data and an overnight announcement by the US Federal Reserve that it would be raising interest rates for the first time since 2018.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission expressed its displeasure at the closure: “Asic views defaults of this nature with significant concern. They have had a significant impact on the market, including market participants and investors. The ASX Group forms an important part of Australia’s national economic infrastructure. A well-functioning financial markets infrastructure is critical to the integrity and reputation of Australia’s financial markets and investor confidence in them.”
ASX must provide Asic with a full incident report.
The outage increases pressure on the ASX after a botched technology upgrade to its stock trading platform in November 2020 that halted trading for a day.
On this occasion, the problem was limited to ASX24 and did not affect the stock trading platform, which continued to function normally.
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