Tokyo Stock Exchange president Atsushi Saito and several of his top executives have had their pay docked over a systems failure earlier this month that saw trading suspended for several hours.
Saito will have his pay reduced by 30% for one month. Hiroyuki Iwakuma, COO, Yoshinori Suzuki, CIO (IT unit), and Yasuhiro Yoshida, executive officer (IT services) are being docked 20% of their pay for one month.
In its worst outage for six years, the TSE was forced to suspend morning trading in the shares of 241 companies on 2 February, the peak of the Q3 earnings reporting season.
The problem arose because of a hardware failure overnight at a market information distribution server which was compounded by the unsuccessful completion of a switching procedure to a standby device.
The exchange says that employees decided that there were no problems with the platform "without actively confirming system status" because of "overconfidence" in the technology.
Measures to improve systems surveillance and new check procedures are now being put in place in a bid to prevent a repeat, says a TSE statement.