Australia's top securities regulator has slammed the country's national stock exchange for a four-hour outage that shut down trading in the futures markets.
The ASX24 futures market trading platform entered into a trading halt at around 10:00am due to a "hardware-related" issue. Power was not fully restored until 14.00.
The glitch came ahead of potentially market-moving jobs data for February, and an overnight announcement by the US Federal Reserve that it would be raising interest rates for the first time since 2018.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission expressed its displeasure over the shut down: "Asic views outages of this nature with significant concern. It has had a significant impact on the market, including market participants and investors. The ASX Group forms a critical part of Australia’s national economic infrastructure. Well-functioning financial market infrastructure is critical to the integrity and reputation of the Australian financial markets and the trust and confidence investors have in them."
ASX will be required to provide a full incident report to Asic.
The outage heaps pressure on the ASX following a botched technology ugrade to its equities trading platform in November 2020 that stopped trade for a day.
On this occasion the issue was isolated to ASX24 and did not affect the equities trading platform which continued to operate normally.