Just days before the launch of a rival platform, the Australian Securities Exchange has been forced to halt trading for four hours by a "connectivity issue".
The technical glitch saw markets halted at 10.05am local time while the exchange "worked with its technology vendor to resolve the issue" before reopening at 2.00pm. According to Reuters, the vendor is Nasdaq OMX.
The timing of the outage has proved embarrassing, with Chi-X Australia set to launch on Monday, ending what has effectively been a monopoly for ASX.
The problem also denied traders the opportunity to react to news of the eurozone debt deal.
ASX has been upgrading its technology ahead of the arrival of its competitor but this is not the first outage to hit in recent times. In February the platform was forced to shut down an hour ahead of the close due to a computer failure.