The National Stock Exchange on India (NSE), the world’s largest derivatives exchange faced a technical glitch on Wednesday (February 24th).
The indices, including NIFTY, stopped updating around 10:08 IST. However, the exchange didn’t announce anything till 11:30 IST. People were anxious, especially because it was a day before the monthly expiry of derivative contracts in the crucial Budget month.
NSE sent a message via National Exchange for Automated Trading (NEAT), communicating that trading was being frozen from 11:40 IST. They didn’t mention anything about resuming trading. Trading resumed around 15:45 IST and remained open till 17:00 IST as a compensation. According to NSE “the online risk management system was unavailable, market functioning could not continue normally and hence had to be shut down.”
This glitch actually lead to a surge in the market. The Sensex rose 1040 points to finish at 50,781. Whereas, Nifty rose 1.9% to 14,892.
The securities and exchange board of India (SEBI) has advised NSE to carry out a detailed analysis as to circumstances that caused the glitch and report back to them.
The halt impacted day traders, brokers and people trading on margin. Some of the traders shifted to Bombay Stock Exchange(BSE). This lead to a rise in the trades in BSE. The BSE Sensex rose 2.07% to 50,781.61. This was much needed for BSE as they have been facing lower volumes due to diversion of trades.
This wasn’t the first time a stock exchange experienced a glitch. It has happened before, but it’s not very common. For example, trading was halted for an entire day due to hardware failure at Tokyo Stock Exchange on October 1, 2020. On November 16, 2020, A software problem caused trading to halt at Australian Securities Exchange for 20 mins.
And obviously Twitter users did not miss on an opportunity to make memes, so I’ll leave you with a few:
The Echo-nomist 
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