Outages Halting Trades Span Globe in Ugly Month for Bourses
- Euronext follows breakdowns on Mexico, Tokyo Exchanges
- Redundancies ‘don’t always work,’ says ex-LSE chief executive
Members of the media work near a screen displaying share prices inside the Tokyo Stock Exchange following a hardware breakdown at the exchange on Oct. 1.
Photographer: Soichiro Koriyama/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
In August of 1994, trading was halted for 40 minutes on the Nasdaq after a squirrel chewed through a power line and the exchange’s backup power system failed to kick in.
Today, the technology that underpins billions of dollars in daily trades has never been more advanced, meaning winning margins can be measured in milliseconds. But even with millions spent on hardened systems, backups, and upgrades, outages still happen.