Tokyo Stock Exchange to reopen 2 Oct after outage

The Tokyo Stock Exchange is to resume normal trading on Friday, after trading was halted for the day on Thursday due to what officials said was a hardware and systems malfunction of its electronic trading system.

There was no indication that the outage at the world's third-largest exchange resulted from hacking or other cybersecurity breaches.

The president and chief executive of the TSE apologised to investors and other market participants.

Officials explained that a computer hardware device called "unit 1" had failed but that the backup "unit 2" didn't kick in, so stock price information was not being relayed properly.

They characterised the problem as a memory malfunction, but said that rebooting the system during a trading session would have caused confusion for investors and other market participants.

The Japan Exchange Group is the world's third largest bourse after the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, with market capitalisation of nearly $6 trillion.

The outage also affected other, smaller stock exchanges in Japan.

The malfunction of basic hardware drew attention to vulnerabilities in the country's digital systems.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has made upgrading such infrastructure a priority, viewing it as critical to Japan's competitiveness.

Previous outages occurred when the huge “Arrowhead” system created by Fujitsu to handle its electronic trading, which officials said involves some 350 servers, became overwhelmed with too many orders at one time.

That’s what happened in October 2018, according to a release on the TSE’s website, but during that disruption, some backup systems for trading continued to function as was the case in earlier outages.

The exchange back then promised to investigate, conduct malfunction tests and change the system to ensure that a flood of orders would not cause the entire system to stop working.

Several top executives of the exchange were penalised.

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