The SIX stock exchange of Switzerland said a technical glitch – now resolved – are to blame for two separate outages that halted trading on Wednesday.
"The technical problems with SIX MDDX have been solved,” SIX commented Wednesday, adding that “the cause of the problem is being analyzed."
An issue with the dissemination of data was reported to have been the cause of the hours-long Swiss exchange outage, according to a spokesperson for SIX.
The data issues – which twice halted Swiss trading across equities, bonds, and funds – also caused issues at the Spanish stock exchange, although trading was not disrupted, the spokesperson said.
The SIX Group, who runs both EU exchanges, said the problems had been fixed for both securities markets.
Considered to be one of Switzerland's worst trading outages in years, the Zurich-based SIX exchange handles some of the region's largest and most liquid stocks trade, including banking group UBS, food group Nestle, and healthcare company Roche, Reuters reports.
"The chances are that the disruption was nothing serious, yet the fact that it comes days after the major CrowdStrike incident raised a few eyebrows," said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank.
"I believe the long term impact will remain limited," the analyst said.
This month’s CrowdStrike mass outage – caused by a botched software update – resulted in serious disruptions for over 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-operated computers impacting financial institutions worldwide. Although most stock exchanges ran smoothly, the financial sector is on high alert.
The data issues began soon after trading opened on Wednesday, forcing SIX regulators to “halt trading in Switzerland due to equal treatment of market participants," the spokesperson said.
They said the disruption forced authorities to declare "mistakes" for multiple transactions, including investment funds bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), bonds, and other structured products.
Trading kicked off as normal, went offline, was briefly restarted, and then went down for the second time shortly after.
By 12:30 p.m. GMT, SIX said the tech issues had been resolved with equity and investment funds stock trading returning to normal. Structured products and bonds trading was expected to resume by late afternoon, the group said.
It’s the third separate tech-related incident to disrupt world stock exchanges in the past six months.
The New York Stock Exchange in June suffered a problem that caused massive swings in shares of Berkshire Hathaway and Barrick Gold, Reuters reported at the time.
In March, a ‘technical glitch’ halted all pre-trading orders on the Nasdaq Stock Market before the opening bell for hours, and in February, several London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) currency trading platforms worldwide were forced to halt trading as the European markets opened.
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