Equity trading on Bursa Malaysia was down all day on Thursday, as the exchange suffered a "multi-hardware failure" of its core trading platform. It initially said it would be running again at 14:30 local time after switching to a back-up facility, but the exchange later announced that this would not be possible.
Local newspapers reported that at a press-conference after normal market-close, Bursa Malaysia CEO Datuk Yusli Mohamed Yusoff admitted that it was the worst failure in the exchange's history, but that they were confident of opening for trading on Friday.
The exchange is currently in the middle of an infrastructure upgrade project for its cash equities business after migrating its derivatives trading to a new platform at the end of 2006. The platform was developed on technology from Atos Euronext Market Solutions - the joint venture between Atos Origin and Nyse Euronext, which was bought out by Nyse Euronext in December last year.
The second phase of the Bursa Trade project is to migrate the cash equity market onto the same infrastructure - which includes the NSC trading platform, Aramis market surveillance platform, and PAM broker workstations. According to the exchange's last annual report, the Bursa Trade Securities platform is due to go live in the second half of 2008.
The exchange has not confirmed whether Thursday's trading glitch is related to the migration.
Separately, the London Stock Exchange was forced to delay the close of trading by half an hour after a data backlog left dealing desks across the City without reliable Level 2 data.