Friday 29 Mar 2024
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SINGAPORE (Nov 6): Singapore Exchange Ltd said an outage on its equity and derivatives market that lasted for hours on Wednesday was caused by what its president called a "ridiculous"-sounding failure in a power supply system designed to be uninterruptible.

SGX said on Thursday the shutdown was caused by a momentary fluctuation in power supply from substations that power its data centre. That fluctuation caused its power system to switch to a back-up internal power source which then also malfunctioned, shutting SGX's equity market for three hours while its derivatives market was out for nearly five.

"It sounds ridiculous to have a back-up of a back-up of a back-up that fails, it's not normal," Muthukrishnan Ramaswami, president of SGX, told reporters at a briefing.

The exchange carries out routine tests of the "uninterruptible" power supply system and the last quarterly test was done in August, he said.

The power disruption will come as a blow to SGX, which has been grappling with a sharp slide in equity trading volumes following a penny stock trading scandal last October. In its recent first quarter results, the exchange said the average daily value of securities traded on the exchange was 27 percent lower than a year ago.

The exchange said it carried out a series of further tests overnight to try to ensure a stable power supply. It said it also put in place new contingency measures to reduce the amount of time it will take its system to recover should a similar incident occur.

The outage left local brokers confused over the status of orders they had placed on the exchange and worried about similar problems going forward.

"The trading community has a lot of concerns, even small organisations have strong back-up power supplies, let alone a national institution like this," said Jimmy Ho, president of Singapore's Society of Remisiers.

"In one way they've been lucky - if it was a busier market and the size of orders was higher there would be so much more to sort out," said Ho.

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