NSE halts trading due to tech glitch
Trading extended till 5 pm after more than 3-hour outage; Finmin, Sebi seek report
The National Stock Exchange (NSE) on Wednesday suspended trading in its cash and derivatives segments for over three hours — one of its worst-ever outage. The exchange cited issues with its telecom service providers that prevented stocks and index quotations from getting updated.
The issue came to light less than an hour after normal trading commenced, with several brokers complaining that live price feeds had frozen. At 11.40 am, the exchange halted equity market trading, forcing investors to redirect their cash market trades to the Bse—where “impact costs” are typically high due to shallow trading volumes.
“NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy, and we have received communication from both the service providers that there are issues with their links," the exchange said, without disclosing the names of the service providers.
Sources said Airtel and Tata Communications are among the NSE’S service provides. The companies have provided fibre cables and enterprise-grade bandwidth to the stock exchange. "We are awaiting root-cause analysis report from NSE. We will be able to share further comment only after studying it," said a source from Airtel. With no communication from NSE on trade resumption even as the normal closing time of 3.30 pm approached, several brokers started cancelling open orders in the system and decided to square off intra-day cash market positions on the BSE. This lead to distortion in several stocks prices, with shares of HDFC Bank and TCS witnessing an unusual drop on the BSE.
Less than 15 minutes before close, NSE and BSE announced they were extending trading hours from 3:45 pm to 5 pm.
Several market players slammed NSE for the lastminute announcement. However, sources said regulatory approvals for extending trading hours took time.
Both the finance ministry and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) sought a detailed report from the NSE as trading was halted for several hours.