Network outage cuts three hours off BSE

Mumbai: In a major setback to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Asia’s oldest exchange, trading had to be halted for over three hours across all its market segments on Thursday due to a network failure. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has asked the exchange to submit a detailed report on the network outage.

“Sebi and the ministry of finance have asked for the details of the network failure. The process is to prepare the report in a particular format, then present it to the technology advisory committee. Then the BSE board would take it up and submit the report to the regulatory body,” said Ashishkumar Chauhan, CEO, BSE.

According to BSE, several lakh dealers log into BSE’s network each day. However on Thursday at around 9.42 am, only 25 per cent of those dealers were able to log in and trade and hence the market had to be closed. The problem was resolved by 12.15 pm as trading resumed from the exchange’s Disaster Recovery Site located at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC). When the network failure was addressed at the BSE building with help from the exchange’s technology partners, trading was resumed from the exchange’s own site.

The BSE outage did not cause any major market disruption since the National Stock Exchange (NSE) functioned smoothly.