Swiss Stocks Halted for Hours in Second Outage in 13 Months

(Bloomberg) — Switzerland’s stock market operator halted equity trading for hours Wednesday after a technical snag that made it impossible to distribute pricing data, the exchange’s longest outage ever and the second to hit it in little more than a year.

The halt began at 10 a.m. Zurich time and trading resumed at 2:30 p.m., SIX Swiss Exchange said. The exchange hadn’t been able to disseminate market data and indexes since about 9:10 a.m., a spokesperson said. Data for the Spanish stock market, owned by SIX, also was affected for several hours, though trading there continued. 

The interruption is another reputational hit to the Swiss exchange, the trading venue for some of Europe’s biggest companies, including Nestle SA, Novartis AG and Roche Holding AG. Last year, the market was hit by its worst outage in more than a decade, with dealing in equities and derivative instruments halted for three hours.

“I went to see our trading desk and they said weren’t able to trade all day,” said Jacques Henry, head of cross-asset research at investment firm Silex in Geneva. “They had a big trade to do but couldn’t, so the client cancelled.”

The latest trading glitch comes almost two weeks after a massive technology failure linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. hobbled trading globally. That event affected the London Stock Exchange Group Plc’s RNS, a service that publicly traded companies use to distribute price-sensitive regulatory announcements. FTSE indexes also weren’t printing prices during some parts of the same day.

In Switzerland, trading Wednesday wasn’t directly affected by the glitch, but SIX was required to halt dealing due to regulations regarding the equal treatment of market participants, the spokespeson said. SIX initially aimed to resume trading at 11:30 a.m. local time but that was scrapped as the data problems persisted. The cause of the outage is still being analyzed, SIX said.

In Spain, pricing resumed at around 10:40 a.m. and stopped again at 11:38 a.m., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Real-time pricing was restored in the early afternoon. 

“It’s never good news for an exchange to deal with technical issues that hit the ability to exchange,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank. “But the lasting impact should remain limited in my opinion. Things like this happen everywhere.” 

–With assistance from Macarena Muñoz, Farah Elbahrawy and Julien Ponthus.

(Updates with Silex comment in fourth paragraph.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.