Hardware failure behind ASX Trade outages

A hardware failure is being blamed for outages to the ASX’s equity trading system, which caused the market to open late and close early on Monday.

In a brief post-incident report, ASX managing director and CEO Dominic Stevens said the "primary issue arose from a hardware failure in the main database" used by the equities trading system, ASX Trade.

“This had a number of knock-on consequences that affected the operation of the market,” Stevens said in a statement.

“These included a delay to the market open and the decision to close the market early due to ongoing issues that impacted the proper functioning of the trading platform.”

Stevens apologised for the system’s performance, and said he would meet with customers directly also to do so, as well as “to discuss what learnings we can draw to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.

“What happened today does not meet the high standards of operations and system reliability that we set ourselves, and that our customers should rightly expect of us,” he said.

“We apologise for the disruption.”

Stevens also specifically ruled out cyber security as the cause of the ASX’s issues.

He said work was now focused on making sure the markets were ready to open as usual at 10am AEST on Tuesday.

The downtime of ASX Trade impacted the first hour-and-a-half of trading on Monday, as well as the final 75 minutes.

ASX earlier said an unnamed technology vendor ran the underlying systems.

The problems at ASX Trade also impacted rival trading venue Chi-X Australia.