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Loading ...I originally caught this via Data Center Kowledge earlier today, it is mentioned in quite a few places now (eg here on IT World and on Computer world UK): The London Stock Exchange had an outage lasting a number of hours this morning.
There isn’t a lot of additional detail, other that it was a ‘connectivity fault’. In the great tradition of cascading failures, the outage also apparently impacted the Johannesburg stock exchange. It must be a pretty serious one to keep things out of action for that long and to spread on to other systems.
It is particularly bad timing for UK traders, as the US government has just bailed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the mortgage folks), which means a fair bit of market movement. The LSE had only just announced a new set of services and improvements. It brings a whole new meaning to quality of service - forget your tools for measuring and tweaking QoS - if the network isn’t working, neither is the business, and in this case, the customers’ businesses too.
Financial service companies have always been very network dependent, given the information-intensive nature of the work, but these days there aren’t many businesses that can survive a big network outage. The financial industry has more experience in running business critical networks, generally building things out with redundancy and resiliency, so it is rare for things to go this badly wrong. It will be interesting to see what learning comes out of this outage, if any. There will certainly be some slapped wrists, that’s for sure.
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