The London Stock Exchange suffered an outage that curbed trading in hundreds of small-cap shares on Thursday, a further blow to a market that has suffered from a shortage of new listings and falling trading volumes this year. The group said it was investigating “an incident” in which investors could only trade shares in the FTSE 100 and 250 indices and global depositary receipts, a certificate representing shares in overseas companies.
The trading venue last faced a major trading outage in 2021 when its Eikon terminals, data platform, and FXall currency trading platform were down for five hours, knocking out some of its most widely-used services. Although extensive outages on exchanges are rare, failures can underscore investors’ reliance on a handful of critical data providers and exchanges for daily trading.