Electronic trading on the London Metal Exchange was restored on Tuesday morning, following a power failure that caused a five-hour outage.
- Trading on the biggest base-metals exchange resumed at 6:15 a.m. after systems were migrated to a backup data center. This was five hours after trading was initially scheduled to start at 1 a.m. London time.
- A person close to the matter said trades were still made via phones during the interruption, as the exchange has a significant phone-based market in demand in banks, brokerages, and institutional clients.
- Electronic trading makes up a third of the volumes on the exchange, but traders depend on such service for live price quotes. It is also used to set the daily closing prices.
- The electronic system resumed operations as the European trading day started, but a number of third-party platforms were still left to recalibrate their systems to reflect the shift to the backup data center.
The LME recorded two major outages in 2016 and 2017, pushing traders to shift to their phones to react to movements on other exchanges.
Source: Bloomberg
