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London stock market floored by computer glitch

Connectivity issues

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Full trading has yet to restart on the London Stock Exchange after computer problems this morning forced it to suspend dealing.

The market rose nearly four per cent in early trading on the back of news from the US that the government is effectively nationalising Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which guarantee most of the US mortage market.

But at 9am trading was suspended as big banks lost their connection to the exchange. Some traders blamed an overloaded system following the US government decision.

A spokeswoman for LSE said: "We have started the reconnection process by making sure all customers are logged into the auction process, which starts and ends trading. That is still ongoing so we cannot give a time for full trading to restart." ®

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Latest Comments

One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

Benefits

• Substantially faster for trades than previous system

• One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days

Yeah right, my names Bill, I've made my cash so I've got me coat!

Someone should sue the fuckers for false advertising.

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@ John O'Hare

They went *from* Tandem (bought by Compaq and then turned into HP NonStop, from what I can tell).

According to the case study, the Tandem system had 100% uptime with no production failures, but I'm sure Accenture and MS managed to persuade them that Windows 2k3, SQL Server 2k (they may have updated to 2k5 since the Get The Facts case study was published) and a custom messaging system written in C++ using .NET would do just as well.

No doubt it was quicker to develop in and introduce changes, as well as having more and cheaper developers than the Tandem setup, but it all depends how much they really valued that 100%.

I remember when there were adverts in The Economist all the time about the LSE (not the uni!) switching to MS and all the various marketing reasons they gave.

CHAPS, the payments system operated by the the Bank of England runs on Tandem kit, although no doubt they're looking to replace that. Any bets for a failure of CHAPS in the next few years? :)

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@ Chris

Well it looks like MS needs to update their case-study site...

"In the past six years, there have been no production outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems running on Microsoft technologies are critical to maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record."

I'll help a bit out here... that 100 should be changed in about 99.5, still not bad for a beefed up desktop OS. Think that maybe the LSE should have gone for the HP nonstop servers for 100% availability instead.

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