It should have been a great day on the London Stock Exchange. The U.S. government had announced on the Sunday before that it was coming to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Trading would have been extremely brisk, but then, at 9:15 AM GMT, the Exchange’s software failed due to “connectivity issues.” Six-hours and 45-minutes later, the London Exchange, along with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE’s trading platform TradElec, were finally back up.
That was no consolidation to traders. As Reuters reported, “We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world … and then we can’t trade. It’s terrible,” one trader said.
So what happened? Officially, the LSE first said that, “We will be investigating this and will do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t reoccur.” Later the LSE gave the vague explanation, that “It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn’t have foreseen,” and not caused by high-volume. The spokesperson added, “We’ve introduced a fix and we’re confident it will not happen again.”
Somehow “we couldn’t have foreseen” and “we’re confident it will not happen again” don’t fit very well together.
