TMX says all systems ready for today’s market opening
The Exchange had to shut down trading on all markets on Friday as a result of an incident that stemmed from a defective storage module.
TMX has confirmed that it is ready for a regular opening today, following an incident that battered the trading on the Exchange for several hours on Friday and stretched the nerves of traders and investors.
On Friday, TMX said it experienced an internal technical issue affecting service on Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV), TSX Alpha Exchange (Alpha) and Montreal Exchange (MX). The problems started at 1:37:25 pm on MX and 1:39:13 pm EDT on TSX, TSX V, and Alpha.
TMX said back then it identified the issue and was working to rectify it. Due to the timing and nature of the issue, however, TMX decided to shut down trading on all markets for the remainder of the day on April 27, 2018.
Today, the mood is optimistic. TMX Group has provided details regarding the market interruption that affected trading on a number of its subsidiary-exchanges.
The outage, which began at 1:37:25 pm EDT Friday on MX and 1:39:13 pm EDT on TSX, TSXV, and TSX Alpha, was attributed to what TMX called “a hardware failure in a central storage appliance of the trading system”. This hardware failure impacted both the primary and the redundant components preventing storage failover procedures from engaging. TMX noted that this incident was not the result of a cybersecurity attack.
TMX started implementing remediation measures on Friday afternoon. These included replacing the defective storage module, verifying the integrity of data of all impacted databases and conducting a successful start-up validation of the entire trading enterprise. Given the time of the incident, however, TMX could not engage disaster recovery systems in time to ensure an orderly market re-open and closing session.
TMX confirms that all systems are ready for the start of business on Monday, April 30, 2018.
Lou Eccleston, Chief Executive Officer of TMX Group, commented:
“We apologize to all of our valued clients across Canada’s capital markets and around the world, and to all of TMX Group’s stakeholders for Friday’s interruption in trading. Our team took immediate action to diagnose the problem and communicate with all of our participants while determining the cause and impacts. Due to the timing and the nature of the issue, we made the difficult but necessary decision to shut down trading for the rest of the day. TMX is committed to applying the lessons learned from this incident to help us prevent such issues from recurring in the future.”
