London's stock exchange crashes again

Updated The London Stock Exchange has suffered yet another systems crash, leaving brokers high and dry since 9.30 this morning.

The Exchange last went down in September 2008 and took almost the entire day to get back online. That outage, on one of the Exchange's busiest days, was the day after the $200bn bailout of US housing giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, leading to lots of conspiracy theories.

The TradElect platform on which trading depends has a flakey history despite a .NET upgrade overseen by Accenture. Microsoft and Cisco were blamed for the last failure, but the Exchange chose not to reveal what the problems were.

From 9.33 this morning customers had problems connecting to two Trading Gateways, problems which lasted an hour.

By 10.35 the Exchange gave up and put all orders in to an auction call period - buy orders are matched to sellers, but the deal does not actually go through until the period ends. LSE has yet to announce when this "uncrossing time" will be.

The update page is here.

Updated:

The Exchange restarted continuous trading at 14.00. A spokeswoman was uable to tell us what caused the failure. ®