The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) yesterday experienced an equity market halt for half an hour due to a loss of connectivity.
MTN, the JSE's international links service provider, has indicated that the loss of connectivity was due to multiple link flaps, occurring between 15h32 and 15h41, on the primary telecommunications link over which the JSE equity market public data flows.
This comes after an outage on 19 July halted equity trading for 34 minutes. It was attributed to a problem with the international link between the bourse and London.
Missed data
The multiple link flaps that occurred yesterday originated on the corresponding international carrier network in Europe, according to the JSE.
It adds that, due to the very short duration of these interruptions, the JSE multicast traffic (public data) would not switch to one of the alternate paths automatically, as would be the case with a longer interruption.
“This resulted in the JSE equity market clients missing approximately 177 000 public data messages. This necessitated the JSE halting the equity market for just over 30 minutes, on 23 August, to allow clients to recover the missed public data in order to ensure JSE clients had an accurate and up-to-date picture of the current state of the equity market.”
Interruptions of this nature require manual intervention to reroute the traffic if they persist, however, in this case, the corresponding international carrier network in Europe recovered before any manual intervention could be initiated, says the bourse.
MTN indicated that this failure did not have an impact on its other customers.
Speed up
The JSE has signed a licensing agreement with MillenniumIT to move its equity market trading activity onto Millennium Exchange, which will happen in the first half of next year.
The move will speed up trades by 40 times and also provide more stability in the trading platform, as dealings will be settled in Johannesburg and not in London.
In the middle of last year, a technical issue with international connectivity delayed the bourse's opening by an hour-and-a-half. In July 2008, the JSE was also hit by a network issue, which delayed the opening of the market until 3pm.
Related story:
MTN outage causes JSE failure
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