LSE’s Turquoise crashes for second time in a month

LONDON, (Reuters) - The London Stock Exchange’s trading system Turquoise crashed for the second time in less than month on Tuesday because of technical problems, clients of the operator said.

Turquoise, which trades the largest European stocks including those listed in France, Germany and the Netherlands, was down for two hours before the exchange in an email confirmed at 1037 GMT that the system was back up and running.

A spokesman for the LSE Group confirmed that Turquoise had resumed trading, but declined to comment further. The exchange said it was investigating the incident and would provide a report to customers in “due course”.

Turquoise had first said it was investigating an issue affecting its trading system in an email at 0825 GMT.

It then sent another email which said: “Both the integrated order book and the midpoint oder book are currently halted.”

The LSE’s pan-European equity trading platform had opened on time at 0800 GMT, according to clients.

The glitch is the second at Turquoise in less than a month after a problem with a network card forced the exchange to shut the system for over an hour on Oct 5.