Monday brought a horrible start for Australia's top stock exchange.
The ASX frustrated investors by failing to open on time because of a technical glitch. When it did begin an hour-and-a-half later, some stocks still weren't trading. Less than three hours into the shortened session, it went down again, this time for good.
One of the biggest exchanges in the Asia-Pacific region, ASX repeatedly apologized for the day's chaotic sequence of events.
ASX CEO Dominic Stevens blamed the crisis on "a hardware failure" that set off a barrage of problems affecting the trading system.
Other exchanges have recently been hit by similar outages.
In mid-July, Singapore Exchange halted trading late morning and failed to get back up for the rest of the day. It blamed the stoppage on "a disk failure." Singapore had also suffered previous problems in 2014.
Moreover, the New York Stock Exchange went down for nearly four hours last year because of an "internal technical issue."
