A technical issue with the JSE's international connectivity caused the bourse to open an hour-and-a-half late yesterday.
However, the bourse and MTN Business, which provides its international link, have not yet ascertained the root cause of the outage.
The JSE usually opens for trading at 9am; however, yesterday the bourse was unable to open for equity trading until 10.30am. This is only the third incidence of trading being halted for technical reasons in the last two years.
Michelle Joubert, head of investor relations, says trade yesterday was relatively quiet. She was unable to quantify what volumes usually trade on Mondays just after the market opens, as trading volumes vary depending on local and international events and market appetite.
The JSE's international connectivity links, which are provided by MTN Business, were operational during the downtime. However, issues were experienced with the public market data flowing on these links.
Investigating
Both the JSE and MTN Business are working on establishing the exact root cause of the issue with a sense of urgency, says the bourse.
MTN Business says it investigated the incident at the JSE yesterday morning, as soon as it was reported, and found there were no problems on the network, with international connectivity being fully functional.
The last time the JSE was down for a similar reason was on 14 July 2008, when the market only started trading just after 3pm. Trading hours were extended to 7pm after a network issue resulted in public data for the equities markets not being disseminated to all JSE customers.
On 8 September 2008, trade was halted at 10.24am due to a technical connectivity problem experienced by the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The technical problem was due to the LSE experiencing connectivity issues, which affected both the London and Johannesburg markets.
In September last year, the bourse had a power outage at its data centre. The outage meant some people had difficulty connecting to the market.
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