Canada's biggest stock exchange, the world's sixth largest, is set to reopen on Monday after its operator said over the weekend that it fixed the error that halted the market for several hours on Friday afternoon.
Fund managers and traders said the rare outage on Friday disrupted Canada's stock trading, sending investors to rival platforms, and had the potential to dent the credibility of the exchange
TMX Group Ltd., which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange and smaller Canadian trading platforms, said in a statement on Saturday that the failure of data storage equipment caused the outage.
The saving grace for TMX, which has been vying to host Saudi Aramco's mega IPO overseas listing, was that the glitch occurred on a low-volume trading day and on a Friday, giving the operator the weekend to resolve the issue.
Outages can inconvenience investors and prove expensive for the exchanges themselves. But many of Canada's blue-chip stocks are also traded on U.S. stock exchanges, however, giving investors another avenue.
TMX said on Saturday the disruption was caused by a "hardware failure in a central storage appliance of the trading system," and noted it was not the result of a hack.
TMX's exchanges in Canada, which include the Toronto Stock Exchange, Toronto Venture Exchange, TSX Alpha Exchange and the Montreal Exchange, account for about 61% of trading, according to official data.
Canada's last major trading outage occurred nearly a decade ago, when a system fault linked to data feeds shut down trading for a full day in December 2008.
