London Stock Exchange suffers third outage in months

LONDON Stock Exchange Group suffered a third outage in a few months as trading was halted in about 2,000 smaller shares.

Trading in the affected stocks was interrupted shortly after 9.15 am local time and again in late morning after a brief resumption, according to the bourse operator.

In October, trading in hundreds of smaller shares was halted in the final 80 minutes of a session. And last month, LSEG’s FTSE Russell indexes suffered a 40-minute outage, disrupting trades in the UK, Italy and South Africa.

“It doesn’t bode well for the LSE as it isn’t the first time,” said John Moore, head of trading at Berkeley Capital Wealth Management. “Investors and traders may lose confidence when they cannot transact, as well as attract attention from the regulator as the issues persists. In this day and age, we expect 100 per cent uptime as per major stock indexes globally.”

LSEG said it’s investigating the latest outage. Back in October, it said the trading halt that affected hundreds of mostly-smaller stocks had been caused by “a matching engine logic issue.”

The recent outages serve as an embarrassment to LSEG as it seeks to transform itself from an exchange provider into a data services giant. Microsoft in 2022 agreed to buy a 4 per cent stake in the company as part of a deal where LSEG agreed to spend billions of dollars on cloud services with the technology giant over the next 10 years.

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In 2021, the company completed its US$27 billion purchase of Refinitiv, which was meant to jumpstart the new era for LSEG. To that end, the bourse operator has said it will create five new divisions starting next year: data and analytics, FTSE Russell, risk intelligence, capital markets and post trade. BLOOMBERG