Millennium bugs hit stock exchange

Crashing like it's 1999

The London Stock Exchange suffered a second day of problems yesterday as its new trading platform struggled to function again.

On Tuesday the market failed to close correctly, causing confusion over closing prices for brokers and traders.

Yesterday the MillenniumIT system displayed zeroes against some bid and ask prices, according to City AM.

The low latency system is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. It replaced a Microsoft.NET system built by Accenture. That system also had its share of problems.

Trading and news systems like Thomson Reuters which depend on LSE data apologised to customers for the outage.

TD Waterhouse told the FT: "Currently a technical issue between the LSE and one of our data providers is affecting stop loss orders on UK stocks. As an interim measure we have taken the decision to manage the existing orders on our book and stop taking new orders."

The exchange suffered a mysterious two-hour outage back in November when it switched over its Turquoise system to MillenniumIT. But that was blamed on "human error", which the exchange claimed was likely sabotage. ®