The Tokoyo Exchange is one of the world’s largest platforms for stock trading. However, on October 1st, 2020, trading came to a halt and shut down all activities for the day. The Japan Exchange Group was quick to confirm that the hardware malfunction was not a result of a cyber-attack. It was not the first time a stock exchange platform has experienced such an outage, but none of the past stopped trading a full day.
The Tokoyo Stock exchange is worth about $6 trillion and is ranked the world’s third-largest, with New York leading, and the second in Shanghai. This is according to the World Federation of Exchanges data. With over 3,700 companies listed in the exchange, ten billion dollars are handled on an average business day.
The technical glitch came at the wrong time when Japan stock market was the one platform expected to be working with other major exchanges, including Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China closed for holidays.
The shutdown was a great disappointment to traders who had just received the Bank of Japan quarterly report tracking various companies’ economic sentiments. According to the report, most businesses were optimistic but cautious due to the limited economic activities experienced in the last six months due to the covid19 pandemic.
This is not the first time Japan has had to deal with similar problems. In 2005, a software upgrade malfunctioned and led to the market’s closure, but for only half a day. Other significant markets, such as New York Stock Exchange, have also experienced such malfunctions; it closed for about four hours in 2013 due to a technical issue.
The spokesman of the Tokoyo Stock says the exchange’s technical glitch is a temporary issue for and can only become a massive problem if it goes on for the next two to three days.
