London Stock Exchange investigates outage

The London Stock Exchange will hold a crisis meeting this Tuesday following an unscheduled four hour shutdown of cash equity trading on Friday.

On Friday morning, it reported technical problems during its opening auctioning call and minutes later halted activity on key trading platforms, Stock Exchange Electronic Trading Services and Sets QX.

The problems related to “a real time data dissemination issue”, the exchange said.

Tuesday's meeting is expected to draw senior executives from four of the largest data providers, Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data, Bloomberg and Morningstar, according to the British Computer World.

The London Stock Exchange has suffered intermittent problems since launching its SUSE Linux-based Millennium Exchange trading and data platform, Turquoise, which replaced its TradElect platform, based on Microsoft technologies.

Within minutes of its launch two weeks ago, several major data providers, including Thomson Reuters, began displaying incorrect pricing data.  

The latest outage infuriated traders, some of whom were still scarred by a similar three hour outage in 2009, according to a report by The Telegraph.