ASX down: Australian share market shuts due to ‘data’ fault

A botched system upgrade has led to the longest Australian share market outage in over a decade.

A botched trading system upgrade has led to the longest Australian share market outage in over a decade, with more than a million transactions lost.

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) ran four “dress rehearsals” for the upgrade between July and last month — but the new system fell apart 24 minutes after the market opened at 10am.

Just before midday, the ASX said it had identified the issue only to state half an hour later that it had not.

At 2.58pm it said the market would not reopen until today, meaning more than five and a half hours’ trade was lost.

The Stock Exchange in Sydney was affected by a tech glitch today. Picture: Gaye Gerard

The $2 trillion bourse has been averaging 1.66 million transactions a day in November — or about 277,000 for each hour it is open.

The exchange later explained that, as part of the equity trading system upgrade, a software issue had created “inaccuratemarket data”.

ASX CEO Dominic Stevens attempted to shift some of the blame to technology provider Nasdaq.

“ASX is very disappointed with today’s outage and sorry for the disruption caused to investors, customers and other marketusers,” Mr Stevens said in a statement.

ASX CEO Dominic Stevens said he was “very disappointed” by the outage.

“The outage falls short of the high standards we set ourselves and the standards others expect of us.

“Notwithstanding the extensive testing and rehearsals, and the involvement of our technology provider, ASX accepts responsibility.

“The obligation to get this right and provide a reliable and resilient trading system for the market rests with us.”

It was the first outage since 2016 when a hardware failure saw about three and a half hours of trading lost.

Prior to yesterday’s freeze, the ASX 200 was up 79.1 points or 1.23 per cent at 6484.3.

There will be an internal investigation and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission will also review the outage.