London Stock Trading Suffers Outage

JANE WARDELL

LONDON (AP) — The London Stock Exchange PLC halted trading for three-and-a-half hours on Thursday after a technical glitch prevented some customers from connecting to its systems.

The LSE, Europe's oldest independent exchange, said taking trade offline was the only way to ensure a fair and orderly market after customers reported the connectivity problems in early trading.

The exchange is still looking into the root cause of the embarrassing outage — the second significant technical problem in just over a year — and said it was too early to judge the extent of the effect on trade or lost business.

Market players were able to continue to place buy and sell orders into the exchange's order book after trading was taken offline at 10:33 a.m. (1033 GMT), but those trades were not executed until trading was resumed at 2 p.m. (1400 GMT).

"We regret the inconvenience that today's disruption to trading has caused for our clients," LSE CEO Xavier Rolet said in a statement. "Having resolved the immediate issue, we are working hard to ensure this doesn't happen again ahead of switching to MillenniumIT's trading platform next year."

The LSE is buying Sri Lankan technology-services company MillenniumIT for $30 million to overhaul its technology as it loses market share to multilateral trading facilities such as Chi-X and BATS since pan-European regulation opened the market to competition in 2007.