Following the major technical snag that halted trading for three hours on the premier BSE on Thursday, the exchange has set up a committee with representatives from “BSE, HCL Comnet and CiSCO, which would prepare a root cause analysis, present to BSE’s Technology Advisory Committee consisting of IT heads of various companies, market experts and academics,” Exchange Managing Director and CEO Ashishkumar Chauhan said.
The root cause analysis would also be presented to the BSE Board, as well as to SEBI, he said at a press conference later in the afternoon after trading resumed.
While saying that the exchange faced network related issues on Thursday, Mr. Chauhan said “several users were logged out abruptly due to misbehaviour of some of the components in the network.” The BSE network connects to more than 10,000 primary connections with all telecom vendors in India participating in the network in addition to BSE’s own LAN network and VSAT network provided by Hughes.
Mr. Chauhan said that every day, more than 8,000 connections log in. Each primary connection could potentially have several tens of users to several thousand users depending on the member convenience and their own network configurations.
Narrating the outage in trading, Mr. Chauhan said that at 9.42 a.m., the number of primary connections had come down to less than 2,000 and “hence market needed to be closed as per current regulations applicable to closure of markets.”
BSE said that its network technology (equipment and service) providers worked in coordination to identify, isolate and resolve the problem. “Experts from US and other support locations also worked throughout the period to resolve the problem.”
The problem was resolved by 12.15 p.m. on Thursday before the market could be started from disaster recovery site located at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City.
Snapping a four-day rally, the S&P BSE Sensex closed at 25823.75 with a loss of 17.46 points. The rupee ended lower at 59.73 a dollar.
