Trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the small-cap TSX Venture Exchange is expected to resume Thursday morning after a technical glitch with data feeds shut both down for the whole of Wednesday.
On its Web site, TMX Group, which operates both exchanges, says its initial findings indicate a network firmware issue resulted in complications with data sequencing, affecting the delivery of feeds.
"Because the data feeds provide information to investors to guide their decisions, trading was halted to ensure market integrity," said TMX.
However, the group says its technology team isolated the issue yesterday afternoon and action was taken to restore all data feeds, meaning both exchanges will now open as normal today.
The market was put into a pre-open state from around 3pm to 5pm to allow participants to cancel, add or change orders.
Trading at the Montreal Exchange was also affected because it relies on the same data as the Toronto bourse.
The outage is bad news for TMX as it looks to fight off increasing competition from new alternative trading systems. Alpha Trading Systems, Pure Trading, Omega ATS and Chi-X Canada have all launched in Canada over the last eighteen months.
Toronto wasn't the only bourse to suffer technical problems yesterday. The Singapore Exchange suffered data feed disruptions caused by network connectivity issues in the securities market.
The exchange says a malfunctioning network switch caused the problem which was set to be fixed overnight.