Euronext trading glitch halts trading for two hours in Paris and elsewhere

By Barbara Kollmeyer

Trading on several major European exchanges was halted for more than two hours on Monday, due to a glitch at the region’s biggest stock exchange operator.

Euronext sent a tweet around 10:22 a.m. CET (4:22 a.m. ET) that trading in all of its /zigman2/quotes/208368645/delayed FR:ENX -0.69% products had been halted. At 12:30 p.m. CET (6:30 a.m. ET), the operator tweeted that the problem had largely been corrected.

“The route cause has been identified and resolved. It was a technical issue impacting the middleware system. Euronext is preparing for a resumption of all markets, but the Warrents and Certificates one for which investigations continue,” the exchange operator said on Twitter .

Among the indexes affected was the French CAC 40 /zigman2/quotes/210597958/delayed FR:PX1 -0.97% , which had been frozen with a gain of 0.8%. When trading resumed at 12:45 p.m. CET, the index was up just 0.2%.

The outage notably would have affected investors of two big companies that reported on Monday — food giant Danone /zigman2/quotes/205561941/delayed FR:BN +0.04% and Dutch health technology group Royal Philips /zigman2/quotes/204604645/delayed NL:PHIA -0.80% . Danone shares resumed trading with a 1.3% rise and Philips with a gain of 3%.

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Euronext operates exchanges in Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Milan and Oslo as well. It recently agreed to buy Borsa Italian from the London Stock Exchange for €4.3 billion ($5 billion).

Earlier this month, Tokyo’s trading bourse was halted for an entire day due to a system failure. It marked the worst-ever failure for the Japanese exchange, which said on Monday it would draw up a fresh plan on how to restart trading should a similar event occur, according to Reuters.

Monday also marks the 33rd anniversary of “Black Monday,” one of the worst trading days in history. On October 19, 1987, the Dow /zigman2/quotes/210598065/realtime DJIA -0.22% and S&P 500 /zigman2/quotes/210599714/realtime SPX -0.94% both lost more than 20% in a single session, which was blamed on unsettling financial developments, plus the rise of computer trading.

Read: The chart investors need to see ahead of ‘Black Monday’ anniversary

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