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Database Hardware Failure Shuts Down Australia's Stock Market Twice in a Day

ASX set to return operations to normal today

Sep 20, 2016 02:00 GMT  ·  By
ASX suffers catastrophic hardware failure
   ASX suffers catastrophic hardware failure

On Monday, Australia's stock market suffered from serious technical difficulties that hindered transactions for most of the day, with the organization closing early to address an issue which it described as a hardware failure.

The issue affected the AEX (Australian Securities Exchange) early in the day, even before the market opened.

Sysadmins struggled to keep services up

According to a series of updates posted on its website and on Twitter, the market opened 90 minutes late because of the encountered problems.

ASX sysadmins struggled to keep the system up and running, taking two hours to restore trading service for about 75 percent of all securities and, eventually, returning service for all operations by 1:00 PM local time.

This didn't last long, because one hour later, at around 2:00 PM, the same mysterious issues resurfaced, and ASX was forced to close stock market activity early.

ASX: Hardware failure in the main database

In the afternoon, ASX issued a statement on the incidents, revealing that "a hardware failure in the main database" was the root cause of the whole incident.

Mysteriously, ASX did not mention anything about why the database redundancy system did not take over. We assume they had one, otherwise, this would be doubly embarrassing. We are talking about Australia's stock market, and not a second rate data center in the Republic of South Sudan.

You can chuck the ASX outage in the category of rare but plausible incidents. Anyway, we don't believe that anything would beat the ING Bucharest data center outage for the "SNAFU of the Year" award.

Two weekends ago, ING Romania's entire banking system went down after a planned fire drill went sideways when a test of the inert gas fire extinguishing system produced a noise so loud it destroyed the bank's data storage hard-drives.  

ASX Statement