Gervase Green, corporate relations manager for the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), told ZDNet Australia a software problem was to blame for the outage, which left market participants twiddling their thumbs from 10:05am until 1:25pm today.
"It's a [software] failure somewhere, we don't know what exactly," said Green. He said the ASX would be going through its servers looking for the problem once the market closes at the standard time of 4pm.
"Our main concern was to restore trading," he said. The ASX has a record of 99.8 percent uptime, according to Green.
Traders were given a standard 15 minute warning that the system was coming back online. Mark Flynn, a stockbroker at Hartleys, said that the outage hadn't affected business significantly, as there was still time to do trading once the market went back online.
"The fact that it happened in the first five minutes took a lot of business for the day, and allowed us to watch a bit more cricket," he said. "Coming back at half past one it put a bit of a dent in the day." Rumours had been running wild about why the exchange went down.
"Our business is reliant on rumours, one of the rumours is that a suspicious package was left at the ASX," said Flynn. "But that wouldn't really have done anything because all the servers are offsite."
