Factbox-Before CME’s stumble, exchange outages that rattled investors

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By Shashwat Chauhan

(Reuters) -CME Group, the world’s biggest exchange operator, experienced an hours-long outage on Friday that halted trade on its currency platform and in futures spanning foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and stocks.

The outage, which began in early Asia hours and was mostly resolved by U.S. morning trade, was one of the longest in years, market participants said.

For decades, exchange outages – triggered by software bugs, hardware failures, cyberattacks, and even unexpected events like animals damaging equipment – have disrupted markets and eroded investor confidence as trading shifted from physical floors to ultra-fast electronic systems.

Here’s a look at some of the other major outages:

August 14, 2024: The Moscow Exchange halted stock market trading for more than an hour due to an outage.

July 31, 2024: Switzerland’s SIX stock exchange experienced one of its worst outages in recent years after a technical glitch halted trading twice across equities, bonds and funds for hours.

July 19, 2024: LSEG Group’s data and services suffered an outage that caused some disruption across financial markets. A broader tech outage also roiled the world that day.

June 3, 2024: A glitch at the New York Stock Exchange triggered massive swings in the shares of Berkshire Hathaway and Barrick, and trading halts in dozens of other companies.

October 19, 2023: London Stock Exchange reported an incident that forced it to halt trading in smaller UK stocks, although blue-chip shares suffered no interruptions.

August 2, 2021: London Stock Exchange’s Refinitiv news and data platform Eikon experienced an outage of several hours, its third such glitch that year.*

June 17, 2021: Pan-European financial markets operator Euronext experienced technical glitches, which knocked out index derivatives trading for nearly four hours.

November 15, 2020: A software problem forced Australia’s stock exchange to halt trading 20 minutes after open. The bourse operator ASX re-started trading a day later.

November 2, 2020: Europe’s key STOXX indexes opened more than an hour late after an outage due to “input data problems”, the index operator Qontigo told its clients.

October 1, 2020: Trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was brought to a standstill by a hardware failure, in the worst-ever outage for the world’s third-largest equity market.

August 28, 2020: New Zealand’s stock exchange resumed trading after four consecutive days of disruptions in the wake of cyberattacks.

July 1, 2020: A software glitch temporarily shut down trading on Germany’s electronic trading platform Xetra, managed by Deutsche Boerse, in July. It was the second time the system had gone down since April.

May 8, 2020: The Moscow Exchange suspended stock trading for 42 minutes because of a software error.

February 27, 2020: TMX Group, Canada’s biggest stock exchange operator, had its second outage in less than two years, when a hardware failure caused problems with order entries, resulting in the shutdown of trading across three local bourses for nearly two hours.

November 1, 2019: Nasdaq Inc’s Nordic and Baltic stock markets were halted by technical problems twice in one day due to exchange connectivity problems.

September 5, 2019: Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing suspended derivatives trading for the afternoon due to a software bug that led to connectivity issues on the Hong Kong Futures Automatic Trading System.

August 16, 2019: A software issue delayed the start of trading on the UK blue-chip FTSE 100 and midcap stock indexes for almost two hours in what was the longest outage at the London Stock Exchange in eight years.

April 25, 2018: Intercontinental Exchange’s New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in five stocks, including Amazon and Alphabet, for part of the day due to a technical glitch involving trade reporting.

July 14, 2016: The Singapore Exchange suspended securities trading for the last half of the day due to duplicate trade confirmation messages being generated.

July 8, 2015: The NYSE was forced to suspend trading for several hours due to an internal technical issue.

March 31, 2015: ICE’s NYSE Arca had a technical glitch that resulted in some of the most popular exchange-traded funds being temporarily unavailable for trading and some investors paying more for stocks than they otherwise may have.

August 22, 2013: Trading in all Nasdaq-listed stocks was halted for several hours after a software glitch caused connectivity issues to an industry data feed.

May 18, 2012: Facebook’s $16 billion initial public offering on the Nasdaq was marred by technical glitches that resulted in a delayed opening and many traders being left in the dark for hours as to which trades had gone through, leading to substantial losses at several firms.

March 23, 2012: Bats Global Markets, which was later bought by Cboe Global Markets, was forced to cancel its IPO on its own exchange after a series of glitches caused by a software bug.

May 6, 2010: Unsettled market conditions combined with a massive, aggressive sell order for a popular futures security triggered a “flash crash” that sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging over 1,000 points, temporarily wiping out nearly $1 trillion in market value.

August 2, 1994: A squirrel chewed through a power line in Trumbull, Connecticut, where the Nasdaq used to keep its servers, and the exchange’s backup power system failed to kick in, leading to a more than half an hour outage. A similar incident had happened on December 9, 1987, when a squirrel chewed through a power cable in Turnbull, setting off a sequence of events that shut down trading on the Nasdaq for nearly an hour and a half.

* LSEG pays Reuters for news.

(Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)