back to article London Stock Exchange limps back online

The London Stock Exchange restored full connectivity today at four o'clock - just half an hour before the scheduled close. A spokeswoman for LSE said: "Trading resumed at four o'clock and we will close as normal at 4.30. We work with a number of suppliers so cannot speculate at this stage as to what caused the problems." …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Clare Furse must be feeling uncomfortable...

    Especially after her flaming letter in the FT today.

    "In the case of the London Stock Exchange, we have been operating an electronic trading engine since the introduction of SETS in 1997, and we recently introduced TradElect to ensure we remain at the cutting edge."

    So cutting you appear to have cut yourself.

    "The emergence of new trading platforms should test the attractiveness of our services, but we do not view this with trepidation."

    You sure about that? Not looking too attractive right now, failing on the second largest rising day this year...

  2. Damian Harvey

    There go the five nines

    99.??

    Nice work.

  3. Ash
    IT Angle

    Market confidence rises...

    ... UK is left out of the loop by a computer issue.

    I don't understand how the stock exchange works, but i'm pretty sure a lot of VERY wealthy Brits are going to make some VERY petrified heads roll on this one.

    IT? Because they couldn't find theirs.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    LoSErs

    Banks get fined when they fail to meet deadlines because of technical problems.

    Paris: their stock exchange is better.

  5. Simon Painter
    Thumb Down

    Shit at being a money market too now?

    is there anything that 'Great' Britain is actually good at any more? Maybe we should outsource this as well.

  6. pctechxp
    Happy

    Maybe

    This was due to an accident with traffic management.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft?

    Is this the same LSE that featured in Microsoft SQL server ads?

    Was surprised there wasn't one accompanying the article - maybe if the author tweaks the keywords a bit...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    I wonder where the support contract is

    some little shanty town some where?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A slap in the face for Microsh!te

    OK, maybe the title line is harsh as there are little facts currently for which piece of hardware/software/interconnect went down but the fact Microshite is in the fray makes it even more interesting!

    http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

    As compared to New York Stock Exchange using Linux and Solaris and seeming to swing back toward Solaris again : http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=16546

    Hopefully Microshi!te get the boot from the LSE, management see some sense after looking at the string of failures blighting the last couple of years. Or maybe it plays right into their hands and LSE can pay double for two of everything now!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    According to a new item on Radio 5's drive time....

    The SE actually closed at 4:21 - 9 minutes early. Doubtless a lot of annoyed traders flooded the system again.

    I'd agree with the commenter who said "Why isn't it run in duplicate?" Hell - we're a tiny firm and even we are putting more resiliance into our systems. An outage on our part won't hurt our customers so much - but it would hurt us.

    Would have thought, if only to save face, resilience would be a key word at the LSE.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    ...wonder if its becuase LSE runs Windows....

    I guess MS must be distancing themselves from that advertising campaign today....

  12. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
    Black Helicopters

    Strange that, eh?

    That after the potentially market altering announcement of the US government bailout of several key intitutions, that the fully redundant LSE trading system goes down... and miraculously comes up just before trading ceases for the day.

    More to this than meets the eye, hence the black helo.

  13. Kevin Bailey

    Did MS software fail?

    The problem seems to have started when...

    'some clients had trouble accessing market data'.

    ...which is a quote from...

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26604500/

    And it could well be that the information comes from an MS based system - see

    http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

    If poor quality software from MS was responsible then let's make sure the message gets out.

    Us techies know how bad MS is at software and we need to get the managers to understand as well. That way we'll be allowed to use proper software which will make life easier for all of us.

    If this huge failure was the fault of Microsoft then let's make sure it is not covered up.

    I have a strong feeling that the 2003 blackout of the NorthWest Unitied States was caused by the Blaster worm which was at its peak at the time but this has been covered up. The last stuff I found was that a unix app crashed due to unusually high network activity - but no-one explains what caused this network traffic.

    This article was an early one which says that the Blaster workm was involved:

    http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,84510,00.html

    But MS seems to have avoided being generally known as the cause.

    And of course, given Microsoft's track record and the compliance of the US government I don't trust them not to have worked very hard on covering up the fact that their software was a major part of the problem.

  14. Kevin Bailey

    To answer my own post - it *was* MS crapware wot caused it.

    See...

    "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."

    ...from http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/08/185238

    There is some earlier blurb from MS....

    "Infolect’s use of the Microsoft .Net framework and SQL Server is a milestone both for Microsoft and the stock exchange. Microsoft has met the exchange’s increasing need to offer clients real-time, business-critical data fluidity, and the exchange has recognized Microsoft’s ability to deploy powerful, innovative technology capable of taking on rapidly growing data loads."

    “The success of this project implementation is testament to the trusted relationship Microsoft has built over the years with the exchange,” said John O’Hara, general manager, Enterprise & Partner Group, Microsoft Limited. “It should act as a signal to the financial services market place that Microsoft is enterprise-ready and more than capable of meeting the demands of business-critical systems.”

    from here...

    http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2006/060712xa.html

    Let's hope that this disaster..

    "act(s) as a signal to the financial services market place that Microsoft is NOT enterprise-ready and NEVER WILL BE capable of meeting the demands of business-critical systems"

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder what the Operating System was

    oh it was Windows.

    Might have made a mistake with that move, a lot of folks will have lost a lot of money over this.

    Now when someone advises you run your business on Windows, you can look at them and remind them of 9/8 LSE, and the billion reasons not to.

    Good market rally today, shame London was not part of it.

  16. Russell Howe

    "One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days"

    http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It says here...

    http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-live/843/Default.aspx

    "The new platform [TradElect] has been designed to the highest levels of resilience with comprehensive back up, which includes dual processing at two sites and recovery from component failure within a second."

    but that was a while ago. Maybe had a few service packs since then ?

  18. El Mono Grande
    Thumb Up

    There's only one thing I can say......

    bwaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Guess they didn't have a DR plan, eh? Nice going LSE.

  19. Wayland Sothcott
    IT Angle

    "cannot speculate at this stage as to what caused the problems"

    The problem was not IT. It was because Fannie May and Freddie Mac were bought out by the US Government. If those had gone down then that would have crashed the US economy and hence the world economy. Monday would have been a momentus trading day. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong at the most critical moment.

  20. Mark
    Coat

    9.999% is five nines

    Sorted.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    fantastic

    the one opportunity to claw back a little of the huge losses incurred recently... and the 'puter goes - UG - too much - CRASH!!!!

    "great" ? Br"IT"ain ?

    All that's left of our once proud nation is BRAIN, and that would appear to be a typo, maybe BRIAN would be more apt ... maybe it's time for a renaming ceremony - we could have a nice big bonfire in central london - close to the Thames perhaps - that would be nice... with fireworks and stuff yeh ... Now then, when? - Hmmm there is a space here in my calendar...NOVEMBER 5TH.

  22. Jack Night

    Connectivity

    If connectivity was the problem, I wonder which ISP is in the SH1T.

  23. druck Silver badge
    Gates Horns

    Amazing reliability for MS

    I think its an amazing achievement that a Microsoft system managed almost 15 months of uptime in a critical role before suffering a catastrophic failure, given the quality of code they produce.

    But now that little experiment with Gate's toy has turned out the way everyone said it would and the opportunity to make untold millions have been lost, its time to put something in its place that wont fall over on the best trading day of the year, and to ensure the person responsible for commissioning it never works in financial services again.

  24. Mark

    @ Mark re 9.999 is five nines

    No it's not. It's 4. Look.

  25. thomasthetanker
    Alien

    Do the maths

    Five Nines = P45

    Conspiracy theorists would say someone did it on purposeAs Chopper would say "You've got to ask yourself, who benefits?"

  26. G C M Roberts

    Not just LSE

    Less reported were the ICE and Johannesburg Exchange outages

    The most stinky exchange in my experience is EuroNext, which seems to spend more time down that up (cue your favourite bishop/actress style remark)

    I'm off to jobserve to look for immediate start contracts in the city for 1-2 days which definitely won't be at the LSE ;)

  27. Mia Arsse
    Pirate

    AutoUpdate failure

    Now they can't even claim that it was traffic peaking or volume for the failure.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSL9953120080909

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    It'll be interesting to see....

    ..what the actual problem was.

    I can't believe this has turned into an MS slagging match when nobody knows the cause of the problem or the technology that failed.

    Was it too much trading volume (as a result of Freddie & Fannie)? If so, why - given that trading volumes have been growing in multiples of 3 (sometimes several times a month) throughout the last 12 months - did the LSE not have 10x capacity available?

    No doubt some techies will lose their jobs over this, but if it comes down to trading capacity then it should be the management who haven't/didn't/wouldn't pay for extra capacity who lose their jobs.

    If it's down to an OS glitch, then slate MS. But it might have been Cisco kit that failed, BT connectivity that ran out of capacity or dropped, or possibly even a cleaner who unplugged a server. ;)

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "BT connectivity"

    Now I'm normally among the first to poke fun at BT, but surely you cannot be serious here? In the City of London, where every carrier worth tuppence has a presence, why on earth would any sensible person choose BT for bandwidth?

    Oh, hang on, the LSE chose Microsoft too. I see what you mean.

    What's the trendy modern significance of FAIL, please? Is it relevant here?

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days

    http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

    Benefits

    • Substantially faster for trades than previous system

    • One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days

    Yeah right, my names Bill, I've made my cash so I've got me coat!

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