Technical Hiccup Shuts Down BSE For 3 Hours

A technical glitch led to the shutdown of trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange for three hours on Thursday. Trading was stopped at 9.30am and it resumed at 12.35pm after the issue was resolved.

Normal trading continued till 3.30pm after this. During this period, the sensex almost broke the 26k mark as it hit a new all-time high of 25,999 points. However, it finally settled at 25,824, down by 17 points.

An initial investigation into issue revealed that it was a hardware problem. BSE CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan said that compared to 8,000 to 10,000 live connections to the server every day, the number fell to about 2,000 at 9.34am forcing the exchange to shut down trading.
The derivative segment's total turnover fell 74% to Rs 13,395 crore, while the equity segment's turnover fell 67% to Rs 1,430 crore as compared to Wednesday.

This was the second technical glitch to hit the exchange in the last two months. "The number of primary connections had come down to less than 2,000 and hence the market needed to be closed as per current regulations applicable to closure of markets," a release from BSE said.

"This was the first complete network outage in the last four years," Chauhan said. He also said that there was no monetary loss to any member due to the problem.