On October 28, the country’s largest commodity derivatives platform, MCX, witnessed a trading outage which lasted four hours and 25 minutes. Trading, which was to commence at 9 a.m., began at 1.25 p.m. This is rather unusual; stock exchanges are expected to have fail-safe trading infrastructure and disaster recovery systems, which ensure that trading halts due to technical glitches do not extend beyond few minutes. Such extended outages erode the credibility of Indian markets, besides inflicting unfair losses on traders and hedgers.

MCX has clarified that the trading halt was caused by a limitation in its software. It was configured to handle only a certain number of reference data such as unique client code. So when the traffic increased on the trading platform, trade ground to a halt. T

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