An unprecedented blockade knocked out the Tokyo Stock Exchange

Due to a problem in the system for transmitting market information to the third largest equity market in the world, it had to suspend its activities. Cyber ​​attack is ruled out

Empty chairs inside the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) after the announcement of the suspension of trading. (Photo by Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images) On October 1, 2020, the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) is closed due to technical problems. This, in short, is the announcement made by the Japan Stock Exchange, the company that controls the operations of the TSE, which in a statement released the news that trading on the Tokyo market is suspended "due to a problem concerning the transmission of market information, ”as stated on Bloomberg. In fact, this is the worst interruption in history on the Asian market, which represents the third largest stock market in the world after Wall Street and Shanghai, with a total value of over 6 trillion dollars of shares traded. the cause of the problem is completely clear, nor when they will be able to resume activities, but the supervisory authorities have ruled out that it could be a hacker attack. Tokyo Stock Exchange President Koichiro Miyahara has announced that the malfunctioning hardware will be replaced today and the system will be restarted by evening so that it can resume trading normally tomorrow.

Meanwhile However, due to the interruption of the transmission system, the regional markets of Sapporo, Nagoya and Fukuoka have also had to stop trading, while at the moment only the Osaka Stock Exchange remains active, where futures on the Nikkei 225 index have increased by 0 , 5%.

The situation is aggravated by the fact that the freeze coincides with the first day of the new fiscal quarter and with the start of the second half of the fiscal year in Japan, a period in which generally the trading volume is generally high. Furthermore, analysts expected for the day that the Tokyo Stock Exchange could also benefit from the positive wave of other financial markets such as New York, which closed yesterday's session higher, and other Asian markets such as the Chinese one which and those of Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, in positive territory.

The other suspensions

The Tokyo Stock Exchange, however, is not new to this type of technical drawbacks. In November 2005, trading had been suspended for 4 and a half hours due to a system update. For its part, Wall Street in 2015 had suffered a temporary closure due to technical problems and failures related to the software that manage the exchanges, while on several occasions in 2000, 2007 and 2011 Piazza Affari had reported failures and suspensions of a few hours .

In July 2020, then, the company Deutsche Boerse AG, which manages the trading of the commercial stocks of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, reported the second failure of this year regarding its electronic trading system. Nothing, however, compared to what happened on the New Zealand stock exchange just over a month ago, when trading was suspended for more than four days due, in that case, to a cyber attack.