London Stock Exchange crippled by system outage

By Daisy Ku and Dominic Lau

LONDON (Reuters) - The London Stock Exchange (LSE.L) suffered its worst systems failure in eight years on Monday, forcing the world's third largest share market to suspend trading for about seven hours and infuriating its users.

The problem occurred on what could have been one of London's busiest trading days of the year, as markets rebounded worldwide following the U.S. government's decision to bail out mortgage companies Fannie Mae (FNM.N) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N).

"We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world ... and then we can't trade. It's terrible," one trader said.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE's trading platform TradElect, also suspended trading.

"This halt today clearly has once again damaged (the LSE's) reputation as a leading exchange, especially on a day like today, highlighting that it may have been unable to handle the volumes this morning," added another trader.

The exchange would not say whether volume was the issue and declined to give details on what had caused the problem. But angry customers were demanding an explanation.

"We want answers as to how this happened in the first place and reassurances that it will not happened again," said Angus Rigby, chief executive of brokerage TD Waterhouse.

The LSE, the world number-three exchange by traded volume in the first half of this year, opened for trading as usual at 0700 GMT, but connectivity problems left some brokers unable to trade. It was then forced to suspend trading to ensure some market players were not disadvantaged.

The Exchange finally got trading going at 1500 GMT -- half an hour before it was due to close.

"We had to sit on our hands and wait for fragmented and at times ambiguous announcements as to when the LSE would be up and running ... It's ironic that since 2:30 today we've been able to trade, and get a fair market value on Barclays or any other ADR (American depository receipt) on the New York Exchange, but not on the LSE," said Rigby.

The UK Financial Services Authority, in its Financial Risk Outlook 2008 report, says the risk of such infrastructure failures is growing with the rise of electronic trading and straight-through processing.

SYSTEMS UPGRADES

The LSE plans a series of system upgrades and is migrating Italian equities to its trading platform TradElect this month.

Monday's trading suspension was the longest suffered by the exchange since April 5, 2000, when problems with an older trading system led to an eight-hour suspension.

On June 17, the Milan Stock Exchange, which the LSE acquired in October 2007, suspended trading due to technical difficulties. On November 7 last year the LSE itself experienced a connectivity problem with its real-time market data system Infolect which connects to TradElect.