THE power outage which suspended trading for three hours on Singapore Exchange (SGX) last week is a reminder of how dependent we have become, as a society, on technology not only for doing business but also for almost every aspect of our daily lives.

It's also a reminder that technology is not a "silver bullet" that can be fired and forgotten about. It needs to be nurtured and monitored; it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The exchange has a state-of-the-art IT (information technology) network with multiple fail-safe systems built in. And yet a bolt of lightning, which lasted for barely 0.1 seconds, was enough to take down the trading system. SGX hasn't released any numbers but brokers have complained of a loss in income due to the outage.

The board of inquiry set up by SGX will eventually unearth why the bourse's uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system malfunctioned. Before criticising SGX, it needs to be remembered that exchanges going down due to IT systems malfunction is hardly unique. In July this year, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in Mumbai, India, went down, also for three hours, due to a computer glitch. Last year in August, the Nasdaq was also down due to a technical glitch. The London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and the Deutsche Boerse, to name just a few, have all suffered from some form of disruptions related to their IT systems over the past few years. And it's not just the stock exchanges. In 2010, DBS' banking services were disrupted for more than seven hours, due to a technical fault. In this case it was later established that wrong procedures followed by an engineer performing a minor repair on the DBS Group's data storage system caused the massive failure.