Tokyo Stock Exchange sets restart after one-day close

The exchange’s chief information officer, Ryusuke Yokoyama, said the machines involved were not connected to the outside and there was no evidence of hacking.

At 7:04 am Tokyo time Thursday, a magnetic disk device used to store business information malfunctioned and the switch to a backup device did not work, the exchange said. That left him unable to convey the pricing information correctly.

Disruptions to major exchanges occur periodically, despite the efforts of operators to strengthen their systems, as e-commerce volumes have exploded in recent years and cyber threats have increased.

In July 2015, a technical glitch forced the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading for nearly four hours, and in February 2019, US futures trader CME Group Inc. halted trading. for almost three hours due to technical problems. In Canada, failures led the Toronto Stock Exchange to end the trading day early in separate incidents in April 2018 and February this year.

In August of last year, the London Stock Exchange suffered a blackout, the worst in eight years, which delayed the opening of the market by more than an hour and a half. At the time, the LSE said that a technical software issue had temporarily prevented a variety of securities from trading. The LSE has suffered two other outages since it implemented a new trading system in 2011.

German exchange operator Deutsche Boerse AG also experienced outages caused by faulty third-party software earlier this year, affecting derivatives and equity trading.

In September 2019, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing said that a bug in third-party software had led it to suspend activity on its derivatives trading platform.

In August, a cyberattack from abroad caused four days of closures on the New Zealand stock exchange.

Officials said a quicker resumption of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange could have been possible by restarting the system, but they feared a disruption if backlogs suddenly flooded the market. They said it was safer to cancel the entire trading day on Thursday, cancel the orders they had been waiting for before the market opened, and start over on Friday.

Assuming Friday’s trading goes as planned, market participants said they didn’t expect a long-term market disruption, but the shutdown was an embarrassment to a finance capital that has been looking to play a bigger role in the markets. Asians as concerns rise about Hong Kong’s future.

At a press conference, Mr. Miyahara, the CEO of the exchange, was asked about the “Never stop” tagline that technology and bag provider Fujitsu Ltd. had promoted by introducing updates in 2015. In response, He repeated an apology for causing market participants to have problems. A Fujitsu spokesperson referred the questions to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Thursday’s problem marked the first time a full day of stock trading in Tokyo was halted since the stock market switched to a fully computerized trading system in 1999.

It led to some unusual scenes. Displays on the exchange, which typically processes more than a billion shares a day, showed zero volume for all market segments. Newspaper stock charts simply consisted of a series of dashes in place of prices.

The Osaka Stock Exchange remained open and futures prices pegged to the benchmark Nikkei stock index rose, suggesting that traders did not anticipate a major disruption.

“It’s good to see that emotions are not taking over the markets in general,” said Takeo Kamai, head of execution services at CLSA in Tokyo.

Write to Suryatapa Bhattacharya at [email protected] and Chieko Tsuneoka at [email protected]