March 16 (Reuters) - The London Metal Exchange said on Monday its electronic market LME Select had been hit by a technical halt and that trading was unavailable as it worked to resolve the problem.
LME electronic trading resumes after nearly 3-hour outage
London Metal Exchange Trading Outage and Recovery
Timeline of the Outage
March 16 (Reuters) - Electronic trading on the London Metal Exchange's LME Select platform resumed at 1730 GMT on Monday after an outage of nearly three hours caused by a technical issue.
Impact on Metal Contract Prices
Prices for the LME's metal contracts, including copper, aluminium, lead, zinc, nickel and tin stopped updating on LSEG's Workspace platform shortly before 1500 GMT.
Cause of the Outage
The LME, the world's oldest and largest market for industrial metals, said its primary electronic matching engine encountered an issue, causing electronic trading to enter a technical halt. The inter-office market remained open throughout, it said.
Official Statement and Disruption Event
"Although all closing prices were produced per the LME's usual process, a Disruption Event was declared, because the system issue affected the ability of market participants to hedge at the relevant prices," the LME said in a statement.
Backup Procedures
The exchange had earlier said it expected to have to resort to a backup approach to produce closing prices.
Previous Technical Issues
On January 30, the LME delayed the start of electronic trading by one hour due to a technical issue.
Resumption of Trading
The electronic market was restarted on the secondary matching engine at 1730 GMT on Monday and trading is scheduled to continue as normal until 1900 GMT, the LME said.
(Reporting by Tom Daly; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Tomasz Janowski)
