SEATS Outage

Australian Stock Exchange's equities market was suspended for approximately three hours today following an apparent software problem during the start of trading. SEATS encountered the problem during the latter stages of the opening sequence of the equities market at 10:06 (AEDT) today. This led to potential corruption of key trade and order data, and accordingly the market was suspended.

As is normal practice, the Options and Index Derivatives markets were also placed into suspension during this outage while the underlying market was restored.

To ensure the continued integrity of the data in the SEATS trading system, ASX conducted a comprehensive review of all systems' status before trading was restored. All trades executed prior to 10:06 were and remain intact. The SEATS system was restored at 13:10, as is customary initially in "pre-open status", before full trading resumed at 13:25.

ASX is conducting a thorough review and investigation of the outage, and market participants will be advised of the result in due course.

In consultation with market participants, it was decided not to extend normal trading beyond the scheduled 16:00 close.

As at 17:00 today, there were 47,500 trades executed on SEATS valued at $2.06 billion.