The Johannesburg Stock Exchange's trading halt on Tuesday has been traced back to multiple transmission failures on MTN Business' network.
The bourse halted trading just after the market opened on Tuesday, and trading only started up again about six hours later. As a result of the technical hitch, about a third fewer trades than usual occurred; even though the market was kept open an hour longer than usual.
Later yesterday evening, the bourse said it and MTN Business had established the reason for the halt in trade of cash equities.
The JSE says, just after the market opened, it stopped receiving multi-cast public trading data through the exchange's international network links that are managed by MTN Business. As a result, it halted trading in the cash equities market.
MTN Business provides the JSE with a managed network service, which consists of multiple international network links to the JSE and includes multiple levels of redundancy, both submarine and terrestrial.
These networks carry public and private trading data between the exchange and its equity trading engine hosted and managed in London by the London Stock Exchange.
“The JSE worked with MTN Business throughout the period, during which the market was halted to diagnose the problem and restore the flow of public trading data to clients,” the bourse says.
MTN Business and the JSE determined that, on Tuesday, “multiple transmission failures across the MTN network, combined with an inability to support multi-cast public trading data on a path in the network effectively at the fourth level of redundancy, caused the multi-cast public data not to reach the JSE, with the result that trade could not take place in the JSE's cash equities market”.
It adds that MTN Business has taken remedial action to resolve the technical issue and will take further action in the following weeks based on its analysis of the cause, including an enhanced monitoring system.
A previous incident about two weeks ago that caused a trading halt for an hour-and-a-half has not yet been explained. However, the companies do not think the incidents are related.
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