CANADA’S MARKETS SHUT DOWN DUE TO EXCHANGE ISSUES

Canada’s stock market, the world’s sixth largest, abruptly shut down Friday after an unidentified outage cut market participants off from the country’s main exchanges. Exchange operator TMX Group Ltd said it was experiencing issues with trading on all its exchange platforms, a rare incident for a major exchange. TMX, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange, did not identify the cause.

In a series of tweets, it said all users had been “equally impacted and are unable to connect to our exchanges.” Shutdowns are rare because exchanges have backup systems that quickly come online when there is a failure. “TMX has decided to shut down all markets for the remainder of the day. Trading will not resume today, including market on close,” TMX Group said on its website.