Swiss stock exchange halts trading due to technolgy issues

Temporarily frozen: the SIX Swiss stock exchange in Zurich. Keystone

Switzerland’s stock market operator halted equity trading for hours on Wednesday after a technical snag that made it impossible to distribute pricing data, the exchange’s longest outage ever and the second to hit it in little more than a year.

The halt began at 10am Zurich time and trading was to resume at 2:30pm, SIX Swiss Exchange said on Wednesday. The exchange hadn’t been able to disseminate market data and indexes since about 9:10am, a spokesperson said. Data for the Spanish stock market, owned by SIX, also was affected for several hours, though trading there continued. 

The interruption is another reputational hit to the Swiss exchange, the trading venue for some of Europe’s biggest companies, including Nestle SA, Novartis AG and Roche Holding AG. Last year, the market was hit by its worst outage in more than a decade, with dealing in equities and derivative instruments halted for three hours.

+ From 2023: Swiss stock exchange probes three-hour blackout

“It’s never good news for an exchange to deal with technical issues that hit the ability to exchange,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank. “The time it takes to go back to business will determine the gravity of the reputational risks but the lasting impact should remain limited in my opinion. Things like this happen everywhere.” 

The latest trading glitch comes almost two weeks after a massive technology failure linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. hobbled trading globally. That event affected the London Stock Exchange Group Plc’s RNS, a service that publicly traded companies use to distribute price-sensitive regulatory announcements. FTSE indexes also weren’t printing prices during some parts of the same day.

In Switzerland, trading on Wednesday wasn’t initially affected by the glitch, but SIX was required to halt trading due to regulations regarding the equal treatment of market participants, the spokespeson said. SIX initially aimed to resume trading at 11:30am local time but that was scrapped as the data problems persisted. The cause of the outage is still being analysed, SIX said.

In Spain, pricing resumed at around 10:40am and stopped again at 11:38am, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Real-time pricing was restored in the early afternoon.