Connectivity glitch halts NSE's trading on for nearly 5 hours

Mumbai: Trading on NSE, India's largest bourse which handles over 90 per cent of the volumes, came to a halt on Wednesday morning due to what the exchange termed as issues with telecom connectivity.

Activity in some segments started facing glitches since around 1000 hrs, within minutes of the markets opening at 0915 hrs, and all activity at NSE ground to a halt at 1140 hrs.

However, trading at the BSE, Asia's oldest bourse which witnesses relatively thin volumes, continued amid the outage at NSE, ensuring that Indian capital markets remained operational. The issues got sorted in the afternoon, and in an unprecedented move, the bourses extended their trading hours till 1700 hrs as against the usual end of trade at 1530 hrs, probably to make up for lost volumes.

NSE attributed problems at its end to failure in telecom connectivity as services from both the telecom operators it uses went down simultaneously.

"NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy and we have received communication from both the telecom service providers that there are issues with their links due to which there is an impact on NSE system," a statement from the bourse said.