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A problem with the London Stock Exchange’s IT network yesterday left City traders just half an hour to cash in on a day of worldwide share booms. Courtesy of the US government, a financial rescue package for the nation’s banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rallied company shares on the FTSE 100 by 4%. But “connectivity issues” for its clients at the outset forced the LSE to suspend its trading systems for seven hours, representing the longest downtime since April 2000. The systems outage, from 8.15am to 4pm, meant brokers got just 35 minutes to cash in on a day of double-digit share gains, until the Footise closed as normal at 4.35pm. A LSE official also said that, so far this year, about £7.9billion is traded on the exchange each day, with a “fairly substantial chunk” falling in the opening and closing auctions. “Member firms were experiencing difficulty connecting to our platforms, so we suspended connections,” the official told CUK, declining to cite the cause of the difficulties. “It’s impossible to give a meaningful figure as to the scale of activity that was unable to take place while connectivity was suspended.” The suspension, occurring in what may have been the busiest trading day this year, prompted calls from clients of the LSE for it to run its system in duplicate. However, some traders were able to enter or delete share orders when reconnections began around midday, yet no trades could be executed, prohibiting accurate share prices. When connectivity returned, universally by 4.00pm, the LSE gave its clients 15 minutes to assess how prices had fluctuated since the morning before resuming trades. The exchange’s own share price has fallen sharply this year, not helped by a similar IT glitch in November, in the light of growing competition from new entrants overseas. The LSE is estimated to derive almost half of its revenues from the sale of real-time information about stock prices, according to Whitepaper portal IDG Connect. The site said the exchange used the .Net framework in Windows Server 2003 and the SQL Server database to build its Infolect system, with support from Microsoft and Accenture. Sep 9, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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