Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, September 8th, 2008

London Stock Exchange servers go down; halts trading

I can’t believe that in this day we have an exchange actually going down during the day… this would never happen on a mainframe platform.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/08/lse_down/

But at 9am trading was suspended as big banks lost their connection to the exchange. Some traders blamed an overloaded system following the US government decision.

I wonder if the issue has to do with their choice of Windows Server over Linux? Of course you never really do see the implications of that choice on Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” or “Compare” websites now do you… :-)

http://www.idgconnect.com/software/windows/london_stock_exchange_achieving_record_reliability_using_windows_over_linux/

The London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to win more trading business and new customers and replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange’s revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices.