Back-up riddle in ASX outage
THE Australian Securities Exchange says it has identified the hardware which caused the nation’s key stock market to crash but still doesn’t know why a back-up system failed to kick in correctly.
The operator of the primary local bourse made no apologies for closing the market in full rather than allow trades to be processed on a rival market.
The defiant stance follows complaints from competitor Chi-X, which says the ASX did not allow frozen trades to be executed through its system although it remained open.
The corporate regulator has launched an investigation into the crash, and Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison has expressed concern over it.
The ASX yesterday released a report into Monday’s crash, which was estimated to have held up $3.5 billion in trades.
It said “an unprecedented hardware malfunction” triggered the outage, which resulted in the market opening late on Monday and closing not long after.
The hardware in question was a controller card and disk within the database server.
The ASX operates a full back-up data centre in Bondi in Sydney – its disaster recovery site – which is meant to take over when its primary centre fails.
The report said the hardware malfunction corrupted the switchover process between the two centres.
While some of the ASX data switched over to the back-up system, some of it remained on the broken primary system.
Thinking the system was fixed, market operators opened the bourse at 11.30am, 90 minutes late, but 1.42pm it was shut again.
System operators replaced the hardware overnight Tuesday and the market has operated without incident since.
“At this stage, neither ASX nor its vendors can confirm ever having seen this malfunction before,’’ the report said.
ASX chief Dominic Stevens said it was understandable that “concerns have been raised on various fronts”.
“ASX does not decide to close the market lightly,” he said.
Mr Stevens said the ASX had recorded 100 per cent system reliability in seven of the past 10 years.
The remaining three years have recorded 99.7 per cent system uptime in each year.