London Stock Exchange glitch delays trading

Trading at the London Stock Exchange was delayed after the organisation experienced a technology glitch.

Trading in FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies, which normally starts at 8am, was delayed until after 9.40am. Share trading on smaller markets was not affected.

A spokesperson at the stock exchange, who was was unable to give details on the cause of the problems, said: “There was a technical issue which delayed trading.”

One hour and forty minutes is a long time in the trading business where transactions are completed in milliseconds.

The London Stock Exchange’s previous outage was in June last year when a software problem caused a one-hour delay.

The stock exchange’s trading platform has run smoothly since it migrated to the platform it acquired in 2009 from Sri Lanka-based MilleniumIT. It acquired the company and replaced its .Net-based trading system at the time, known as Tradelect.

The company recently agreed to acquire Refinitiv for £22bn, creating a giant of global financial data and transactions.

Refinitiv, previously known as Thomson Reuters financial and risk business before it was acquired by Blackstone Group in October 2018, will add significant IT resources to the London Stock Exchange.

Refinitiv has an internal IT team made up of more than 5,000 people, and it has around 4,000 workers via suppliers or contracting. It has major tech hubs in Bangkok, Beijing, Bangalore, New York City and St Louis in the US, as well as around 600 people in the UK tech team.

It collects more than one petabyte of data every day and processes more than a million unstructured documents. Its data platform provides 40 billion market updates every day.