By Harry Robertson and Alun John
LONDON (Reuters) -Switzerland’s SIX stock exchange experienced one of its worst outages in recent years on Wednesday, after a technical glitch halted trading twice across equities, bonds and funds for hours.
By mid-afternoon in Europe, SIX said the issue had been resolved and stock trading resumed at around 1230 GMT (1430 CET). It briefly restarted trading in the morning session, only to go offline again as the problems persisted.
Some of the region’s largest and most liquid stocks trade on the Swiss exchange, including banking group UBS, food group Nestle and healthcare company Roche.
The Spanish stock exchange, which SIX operates, was also suffering data problems, but trading continued as normal, a spokesperson said. The person said the data issues were resolved along with the problem affecting Switzerland.
“The chances are that the disruption was nothing serious, yet the fact that it comes days after the major CrowdStrike incident raised a few eyebrows,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank. “I believe the long term impact will remain limited.”
A botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier this month caused a mass outage of Microsoft systems, affecting banks and impacting financial data company LSEG.
The Swiss exchange first ran into issues soon after trading opened. Multiple trades including in bonds, ETFs, and structured products were declared “mistrades” and cancelled.
A spokesperson for SIX said Swiss trading had not initially been affected and that the issue was with the dissemination of data, “but we had to halt trading in Switzerland due to equal treatment of market participants”.
SIX’s problems come at a time of intense competition between European financial centres as they struggle to keep up with the dominance of U.S. capital markets.
Trading outages and glitches are not uncommon although they are typically patched fairly quickly.
Incidents last year forced the London Stock Exchange to halt trading in smaller companies, and the New York Stock Exchange in June suffered a problem that caused massive swings in shares of Berkshire Hathaway and Barrick Gold.
(Reporting by Harry Robertson and Alun John; additional reporting by Emma Pinedo Gonzalez in Madrid and John Revill in Zurich; editing by Amanda Cooper and Mark Potter)