Yahoo Finance FTSE: London Stock Exchange outage halts trading for 2,200 shares
The London Stock Exchange (LSEG.L) faced two outages on Tuesday morning, hitting trading in hundreds of small cap stocks.
It was the fourth trading outage in two months, with FTSE 100 (^FTSE) and 250 (^FTMC) stocks unaffected by the halt.
Trading was suspended in about 2,200 smaller shares, including online retailer Asos (ASC.L), drinks maker Fevertree (FEVR.L) and polling company YouGov (YOU.L). Online food delivery company Deliveroo (ROO.L) was also unable to trade on Tuesday morning.
The exchange said: "The London Stock Exchange is still investigating an incident.
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"We are undertaking immediate analysis and will provide further updates through our live service portal.
"Currently only FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and IOB securities are available for trading."
Shortly after 10am, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) said in a notice that trading across all its markets had resumed. It did not disclose the cause of the issue.
London Stock Exchange Is Hit By Third Outage Since October pic.twitter.com/7AerZwb5Wk
— Baron Investments (@baroninvestment) December 5, 2023
However, trading was again halted later in the morning. The bourse put up a notice at 11.35am saying it is “still investigating an issue” and that only the FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and IOB securities are available for trading.
The notice added: “We are undertaking immediate analysis and will provide further updates through our live service portal.”
At around noon, it said trading was returning to shares affected by its outage. Again, it gave no explanation as to what caused two outages in one single morning.
John Moore, head of trading at Berkeley Capital Wealth Management, said: "It doesn’t bode well for the LSE as it isn’t the first time.
"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% uptime as per major stock indexes globally."
In October, the exchange was hit by a roughly 80-minute outage which halted trading for hundreds of smaller stocks, with FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 shares once again unaffected. In November, FTSE Russell indices also faced a trading glitch.
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In 2019, the London Stock Exchange suffered an almost two-hour outage that hit FTSE 100 and midcap stocks, which LSEG said was caused by a “technical software issue”.
The recent outages come as LSEG is seeking to transform itself from an exchange provider into a data services provider.
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