Between 26 and 50 customers were affected by an outage on the Nasdaq Stock Market’s core matching engine yesterday, with the issue lasting almost three hours having been first reported at 4.09am.
At the end of the trading day yesterday, Nasdaq’s post-mortem highlighted that the pre-trading issue affected trading for those using Rash and/or FIX as well as customers connected directly via OUCH or FLITE.
“As a result [of the issue] customers connected directly to the matching engine via OUCH or FLITE were disconnected and unable to send new orders or cancel open orders. Customers using Rash and/or FIX received unacknowledged/rejected orders during the issue and were unable to cancel resting orders. During the issue, the matching engine was unavailable and no orders were executed,” said the exchange.
The connectivity issue was first addressed by Nasdaq Stock Market at 4.55am yesterday, 18 March, before the exchange confirmed in an update that the issue was specifically related to its core matching engine.
Almost an hour after its initial communication, Nasdaq was continuing to investigate the matching engine issue continuing to affect connectivity to the exchange. At 5.37am the venue shared a statement that order sent using RASH FIX engine were not being acknowledged currently.
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This subsequently led to the unacknowledged orders on Rash FIX being cancelled back to customers as Nasdaq took corrective action, including taking steps to “cancel on disconnect triggered when the matching engine came back up if a port was configured for COD”.
By 7.15am Nasdaq had resolved the issues with its matching engine with “all systems operating normally”.
The number of outage incidents across the globe has continued to grow in recent times, with these market disruptions exacerbating the ongoing analysis by regulators to ensure stricter processes in these instances.
In June 2023, SIX Swiss Exchange experienced its worst outage for over 10 years, halting trading for three hours, while later in the second half of 2023 the London Stock Exchange (LSEG) experienced two outages on AIM stocks between October and December.
Other previous outages include Nasdaq’s Nordic markets which closed on 16 November 2022 without an auction, while marketplaces of the European exchange operator, Euronext, also suffered a three-hour interruption to trading on 19 October 2020, while Deutsche Börse also experienced two separate outages during 2020 due to software glitches.
The outages are likely to spur on ongoing analysis by regulators globally over the stability and resilience of exchanges and procedures during market outages – specifically as regards their communications.