On Wednesday, Switzerland's SIX stock exchange faced one of its most severe outages in recent years due to a technical malfunction, which twice halted trading in equities, bonds, and funds for several hours.
By mid-afternoon in Europe, SIX announced that the issue had been resolved, and stock trading resumed around 1230 GMT. Trading had briefly restarted in the morning session before being disrupted again as the issues continued.
The Swiss exchange hosts some of the region's largest and most liquid stocks, including banking giant UBS, food conglomerate Nestle, and healthcare leader Roche. Additionally, SIX operates the Spanish stock exchange, which experienced data problems but maintained normal trading, according to a spokesperson. The data issues were resolved concurrently with the problems in Switzerland.
Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote Bank, commented, "The disruption likely wasn't serious, but its occurrence shortly after the significant CrowdStrike incident has raised concerns." She believes the long-term impact will be minimal. Earlier this month, a failed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a widespread outage of Microsoft systems, affecting banks and financial data company LSEG.
The Swiss exchange encountered issues shortly after opening. Several trades, including those in bonds, ETFs, and structured products, were declared "mistrades" and subsequently canceled. A spokesperson for SIX noted that Swiss trading wasn't initially affected; the issue was with data dissemination, but trading was halted in Switzerland to ensure equal treatment of market participants.
SIX's difficulties arise amid fierce competition among European financial centers striving to compete with the dominance of US capital markets. Trading outages and glitches, though not uncommon, are usually resolved fairly quickly. Last year, incidents forced the London Stock Exchange to halt trading in smaller companies, and in June, the New York Stock Exchange experienced a problem causing significant fluctuations in shares of Berkshire Hathaway and Barrick Gold.
