Still down...

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/products/membershiptrading/tradingservices/Incident/LIVE

35 years in IT has taught me not to believe in coincidences

Well Acorn Archimedes machines are getting a bit long in the tooth.... I've never seen a story about the LSE changing their hardware platform so it might even be true!!!!

"Stock market crashes".

light on details but if more than one bank couldn't connect it is unlikely to be a connectivity issue, sounds like the system just froze

Odd, the same thing happened on the JSE (the stock exchange in South Africa).

Non, c'est pas vrai, je suis just leaning on the button, jean, and it commencez'ed.

... everything costs zero. buy buy buy!

From the Microsoft get the facts page for the LSE at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

The London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance ...

Looks like they failed on all all three accounts then.

Where the IT icon, because thats what the traders where asking this morning.

Not sure how scaleable they are though...

... to tell them they're incident communcation page is broken in firefox?

The weekend's announcement regarding the effective nationalisation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was probably the most significant piece of economic news this year and sent the share prices of most of the UK banks up by more than 10%

The LSE seems to have major problems coping with the order flow traffic whenever there is a major piece of financial news. There have been at least 3 other crap-outs this year where I've spent most of the day looking at their incident status web page.

With PLUS Markets, Chi-X, and the soon to be rolled out Project Turquoise all competing for the LSE's business, I wonder how much longer it will be the preferred execution venue for trading UK equities.

Paris - cos she has plenty of capacity.

That status page only renders correctly in IE for me, and not Firefox. Presumably this information that all LSE clients are using IE is useful to hackers/phishers/social engineers...

John Imrie beat me to it with regards to Microsofts 'Get the Facts'.

They are probably in the middle of their monthly reboot. Or patch Tuesday came a day early.

/Mine's the coat with the patches that work.

The JSE is run by the LSE, which is why it is also down.

well they are the ones that went with MS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200042

I saw one on Yahoo Answer! last night, keep boosting hes a senior tech at the Geek Squad, may be the LSE should find him on Yahoo! and get him in quick. Cant do any worst than what they are using at LSE by look of things.

No connectivity, no comment. No FT (that's Fault Tolerance, obviously).

Well it seems easy to me... Just install Google Chrome and that'll be the end of all your problems. In fact, I doubt if anyone at the LSE will have another day off sick ever again, and the FTSE will probably close up more than 1000 points.

Google Gears and apps can easily power the LSE. I saw the inside of that place on the news once and they were all using MSIE on huge screens. Man, no wonder they lost so much money last week. IE sucks. It's Java run too slow to make any money.

Having shot Blighty's manufacturing ability down the pan, we were told that our economy relies on the Financial Sector doing wonderful stuff for us...

...shame we're no b***dy good at that either!

have the tech support wallahs been to be switching off and on and to be doing the needful?

If its an IT issue in the UK, then we best ask India to fix it, as there are sod all qualified tech people left here that would run this sort of mess.

Johannesburg went down, as did the ICE in the USA. They, and the LSE, use the SETS platform.

This looks really bad for them. Their rivals, mentioned above by AreBelongToUs (who garnished his insightful post with a Paris reference like a turd on a sponge cake) are more reliable and cheaper. It's only inertia that keeps volumes so high on the LSE. A few more incidents like this and they'll become a backwater, used for trade reporting and listing only.

over enthusiastic traffic management

Maybe they should have used intel instead :-)

http://enterprise.amd.com/us-en/eNews/archive/2006_05.htm

The London Stock Exchange turns to AMD and HP for an Edge in the Increasingly Competitive Global Financial Marketplace

As one of the world’s premier stock exchanges, the 200+ year old London Stock Exchange (LSE) processes billions of transactions daily, forcing its management team to stay at the front of the technology curve. “We strive to be the most advanced Exchange in the world,” said Robin Paine, CTO. To keep its technological edge, the LSE chose to rely solely on AMD Opteron™ processors to power its new trading system.

"Working with Microsoft and <b>Accenture</b>, the London Stock Exchange replaced ...."

(my emphasis)

and

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

oops.

Don't make me make the obvious joke.

And Acorns *are* scalable. Check out the Master 512! Awesome. And that Tube r and the 1MHz bus; even the Model B can run CP/M with with 8086 secondary processor.

Damn, I need 'get me coat', 'joke alert' *and* 'boffin/geek' I think. Mine's the one with the Mode 7 Teletext display, for Prestel.

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.

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? :)

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.