London's stock exchange crashes again
Who's to blame this time?
Posted in Management, 26th November 2009 12:23 GMT
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
Updated The London Stock Exchange has suffered yet another systems crash, leaving brokers high and dry since 9.30 this morning.
The Exchange last went down in September 2008 and took almost the entire day to get back online. That outage, on one of the Exchange's busiest days, was the day after the $200bn bailout of US housing giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, leading to lots of conspiracy theories.
The TradElect platform on which trading depends has a flakey history despite a .NET upgrade overseen by Accenture. Microsoft and Cisco were blamed for the last failure, but the Exchange chose not to reveal what the problems were.
From 9.33 this morning customers had problems connecting to two Trading Gateways, problems which lasted an hour.
By 10.35 the Exchange gave up and put all orders in to an auction call period - buy orders are matched to sellers, but the deal does not actually go through until the period ends. LSE has yet to announce when this "uncrossing time" will be.
The update page is here.
Updated:
The Exchange restarted continuous trading at 14.00. A spokeswoman was uable to tell us what caused the failure. ®
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
COMMENTS
"despite a .NET upgrade overseen by Accenture"
Hahaha hahahaha hahahahaha hahahaha <gaaaaaaaasp> ha haha hahahaha hahahahahaha hahaha.
Stop the internet, nothing can ever beat the humour of this statement.
Unreliable?
"...despite a .NET upgrade overseen by Accenture."
I can see two likely candidate reasons for it being a pile of poo in that statement alone.
No surprise
Well WTF do they expect if they try to run a mission-critical application on a Microsoft platform? Honestly!
We're from Anderson Consulting, and we're here to help you
There are no software or hardware problems: they are all 'soft engineering' problems arising in bad management decisions and dysfunctional administration. As in, contracting out your core competence to Accenture and sidelining everyone who offered a negative opinion: that is to say, everyone who knew enough to be able to sort out the specific 'software' problem that they've got today.
Doubtless the problem will be resolved to the satisfaction of everyone who matters by a corporate rebranding exercise.
Anonymous comment, for obvious reasons...
They haven't moved from .net to Linux yet...
The LSE are going to move over to a Linux/Solaris platform (see tinyurl.com/yauqcdk), but it takes more than a few days/weeks to transfer a system of that size over to a new platform and adequately test it. I'd give it a year before it's fully up & running, more if the LSE start asking for design changes during the implementation phase :-)
The new Office Garage series:
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
