The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has released a report on the service outage and eventual early close of trade on Monday, 19 September.
The report, titled ASX Trade Outage – 19 September 2016, found that on Monday, 19 September an “unprecedented” hardware malfunction triggered a complete database ‘failover’ to the disaster recovery site (DRS).
Not all parts of ASX Trade successfully connected to the DRS database, however. As a result, the ASX could not open the market until 11:30am and took action to close the market at 2:05pm.
Commenting on the outage, ASX chief executive Dominic Stevens said it was “unacceptable to the market and unacceptable to ASX”, and offered his apologies for the disruption caused.
“Our first priority was to ensure the market functioned normally and reliably when we reopened on Tuesday morning. This was achieved and it has operated without issue since,” Mr Stevens said.
“ASX does not decide to close the market lightly. Understandably, concerns have been raised on various fronts. However, we make no apologies for following our long-established and well understood protocols nor for exercising our judgement to ensure the market was fair, orderly and transparent. That is ASX’s responsibility.
“I am determined that in understanding what happened on Monday we will emerge stronger and better able to manage the market’s myriad challenges.
“We are directing our efforts to ensure there is no recurrence and listening to what our customers say about improving the way we communicate with them. And of course, we are also co-operating closely with ASIC to help with its review.”
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