Tuesday's outage at the Toronto Stock Exchange that temporarily halted trading may have frustrated investors and traders, but it's not the only high-profile technical glitch to affect a major global securities exchange in recent years.
The digital platforms through which international traders deal in equities, options, futures and more have been proven many times in recent years to be vulnerable to hardware problems, software bugs and cyberattacks.
The TMX Group, which operates Canada's largest equities market, has not yet provided a reason for Tuesday's outage, which lasted for approximately 40 minutes. TMX said it was experiencing a connection issue at the time with the TSX order entry symbol range M to S.
TMX was previously hit with an outage in February 2020 due to a system capacity issue amid heavy trading during the early days of the pandemic, while a 2018 outage was blamed on a hardware failure.
However, Canada's main stock exchange is not alone among global markets in its struggles with technical problems.
In 2021, an internet outage took out the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for less than an hour while in 2020, a hardware failure shut down trading for a full day on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — the worst-ever outage suffered by what is the world's third-largest stock market.
In August of 2020, New Zealand's stock exchange suffered four consecutive days of disruptions in the wake of cyberattacks.
In 2015, trading on the New York Stock Exchange was halted for an unprecedented four hours due to a system malfunction.
Trading was also halted on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange for several hours in 2013, giving rise to the term "flash freeze" as a description for the network connectivity issues.
Other stock markets that have been affected by technical outages in recent years include the Moscow Exchange, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 1, 2022.
Companies in this story: (TSX:X)
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