Australian ASX suffered a technical outage in the early hours of Monday morning, adding more pressure and concern to the trading sector so soon after last week’s CME shutdown.
As reported by Reuters, ASX “is facing fresh pressure to enact its turnaround plan, after its announcements platform suffered an outage on Monday, forcing about 80 stocks to be placed on a trading halt.”
The exchange said that the ASX Trade remains fully operational, but it has to collaborate with companies whose price-sensitive announcements were affected by the outage. Trading in these firms is still suspended.
The exchange also added that companies that had been placed in a trading pause will resume operations after their announcements are published.
ASX Outage Comes Amid Regulatory Investigation
The problem emerged soon after the Aussie exchange operator got under scrutiny from the local regulators for failures regarding governance, capability, and risk management frameworks and practices across the group.
The exchange was a target of a joint investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which started earlier this year. The regulator and the bank started looking into the exchange after multiple outages and glitches on the ASX. The clearing and settlement system of the Aussie exchange is also under scrutiny.
The exchange developed a plan to transform its legacy clearing and settlement platform into a blockchain-based one back in 2017. However, the project was running into numerous issues, and it kept facing delays until it was eventually abandoned five years later, in 2022.
Instead, the platform hired India’s Tata Consultancy Services in 2023, tasking it with conducting a staged upgrade of the platform. The firm is expected to deliver the first part next year, in 2026, at an estimated cost of AU$105 million and AU$125 million
Apart from that, the exchange suffered from other problems, such as incorrectly tagging one of Australia’s largest internet providers in an unrelated takeover announcement last August. This resulted in a massive wipeout of AU$400 million from its publicly listed stocks. Later, the platform suspended the stock from trading and said that it had cancelled the trades.
Now, its newest outage comes only days after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which is one of the largest derivatives venue operators, suffered a 10-hour outage on Friday. The platform’s services went down as data center cooling systems affected its popular currency platform and futures markets, including forex, commodities, Treasuries, and stocks.