Glitch once again shuts down London Stock Exchange

The London Stock Exchange PLC halted trading for three and a half hours on Thursday because of a technical glitch that prevented some customers from connecting to its systems. The LSE, Europe's oldest independent exchange, resumed trading at 14:00 GMT but said it was still looking into the root cause of the outage. It was too early to judge the extent of the effect on trade or lost business, it added. Market players were able to continue to place buy and sell orders into the exchange's order book after trading was taken offline at 10:33 GMT, but those trades were not executed until trading was resumed. LSE spokesman Alistair Fairbrother said there was no suggestion the problem was related to heavy trading activity early in the session — stock indexes in both Europe and Asia were down sharply as investors fretted over debt problems at Dubai World, a government investment company, and the continued fall in the U.S. dollar. Those factors were driving interest on a normally quiet day — Wall Street is closed for Thanksgiving Day. The FTSE 100 index, which was frozen at 5,264.97 — down 99.84 points — when trading was halted, fell even further when trade resumed. The index was 112.78 points lower at 5,252.03 at 14:45 GMT. The technical hiccup is another embarrassment for the LSE as it contends with growing competition from rival trading platforms. Just over a year ago the bourse experienced its worst outage in almost a decade when a software glitch was blamed for a 7-hour shutdown that angered customers on one of the busiest days of the year on world equity markets. On that day in September 2008, the shutdown left many clients unable to cash in on a worldwide stock market boom that followed the U.S. government bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The LSE is buying Sri Lankan technology-services company MillenniumIT for $30 million to overhaul its technology as it loses market share to multilateral trading facilities such as Chi-X and BATS since pan-European regulation opened the market to competition in 2007. It acknowledged this week that increased competition and lower trading were to blame for a 40 percent drop in first half earnings. The bourse reported net profit of 49.3 million pounds ($82.4 million) for the six months ended Sept. 30, down from 81.7 million pounds a year ago. Revenue fell 9 percent to 310.9 million pounds.