.jpg)
Re: ASX Equity Market Outage Update
I would like to update you on the ASX equity market outage we experienced on Monday, 16 November 2020.
While ASX has engaged significantly with the market at an operational and informational level since the incident, I wanted to write to you personally to repeat how sorry I am for the disruption the outage has caused.
As you may know, ASX, our customers and Nasdaq, our technology partner, were well prepared for and confident about the go-live of the new system, given the extensive testing and rehearsals we had completed together over the last 12 months. Nevertheless, we encountered issues on the day that required us to suspend trading. Ultimately, it is ASX’s responsibility to get it right.
Our focus since the incident has been on ensuring the stability of the system, and by extension the market, working closely with our customers and restoring functionality. The core trading platform has been operating normally since the day after the incident and our Centre Point service resumed this Tuesday. Tailor Made Combinations functionality, the most complex feature of the system, which was at the heart of the software issue that caused the market disruption, remains suspended until a detailed investigation is completed.
We will continue to communicate with the market about the outage, to explain what happened, what was done to recover the system and what steps have been taken to prevent a recurrence of the issue that caused the outage.
The outage did not match ASX’s high operational standards or the standards expected of us. Nor did it match our record of being one of the most reliable and resilient exchanges globally.
Across the last three years, including via our Building Stronger Foundations initiative, ASX has devoted significant resources to upgrading its technology, with our capital expenditure rising 60% and staff numbers growing 31%. This has resulted in the lowest ever level of outages across our five main trading and post-trade systems since they were brought together by the ASX-SFE merger in 2006. In fact, across all these platforms we have had 100% uptime for the last two financial years (FY19 and FY20) and averaged 99.9% uptime over the three financial years prior to that (FY16 to FY18). Our track record of delivering large technology projects without incident is also strong, including a new futures trading system, consolidated ASX Net communications network and new secondary data centre (which involves rolling out a new instance of each of our systems in a new facility).
I believe it is in the interests of you, our customers, and the Australian market more broadly that we continue to contemporise and upgrade our systems and technology. I can assure you that we will learn from last week, work hard to regain your confidence and continue to refresh our technology in a safe and timely manner. [Over the coming weeks, I would like to catch-up with you to discuss these important matters further.] I look forward to the engagement.
Kind regards,
Dominic Stevens
Managing Director and CEO
