The Philippine Stock Exchange [PSE 177.00, up 0.1%; 9% avgVol] [link] was forced to suddenly halt trading across the entire market at 9:32 a.m. yesterday after it encountered a 'technical issue' with its 3rd party front-end system provider. No information was provided to traders at the time of the halt, and no guidance was provided as to the length of the trading disturbance. After nearly 2.5 hours, the PSE suddenly published a circular that 'trading resumed' at 11:56 AM, just four minutes before the start of the lunch break. Then, later in the day, the PSE provided an update to say that the afternoon trading session (from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.) would go ahead as normal, and that the PSE is still investigating the root cause of the interruption with the 3rd party service provider.

MB bottom-line: On a day of bad looks this one was probably the worst, but I don't think it was all that surprising. That's the most disappointing part. After all this time, the Filipino investor is (unfortunately) accustomed to random material outages of critical infrastructure, and to receiving very little in the way of transparency over the cause of the problem, who is accountable, and whether or not it's likely to occur again in the future. So the market went back to normal trading, but is this something that will pop up again today? Next week? Next month? This outage alone means that the PSE wouldn't be able to satisfy a three-nines uptime commitment (99.9% uptime), which is already a very low level of service availability for something in the infrastructure/backbone layer.

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