As European markets commenced trading on Thursday, various platforms operated by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) encountered temporary disruptions, affecting news dissemination and currency trading activities globally.
Traders in India and Singapore reported glitches across LSEG’s market data platforms, including Eikon and Workspace, as well as its interbank foreign exchange matching systems FXT and FXall. The outages persisted for approximately 30 minutes to 45 minutes before systems began returning to normalcy around 0700 GMT, Reuters news report said.
While LSEG remained tight-lipped regarding the cause of the disruptions, an official spokesperson for the group refrained from immediate comment in response to inquiries.
While the extent of the impact on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) itself remained unclear, the exchange’s website status page indicated normal functioning across all systems during the outage period.
This incident follows a previous outage on October 19, which compelled the exchange to suspend trading in smaller stocks, marking its first interruption since 2019. Moreover, users encountered intermittent disruptions on LSEG’s news and data platforms in select European countries in late September, while the Indian foreign exchange platform experienced technical difficulties in November.
Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News, holds a minority stake in LSEG, with the latter contracting Reuters for its news service. Notably, LSEG’s flagship product, Workspace, which offers financial data, real-time news, and access to Reuters news, stands as the largest division within its data and analytics segment.
The disruption comes as LSEG commemorates the three-year anniversary of its transformative acquisition of Refinitiv in January. This strategic move has reshaped LSEG’s revenue composition, with approximately 70 percent now derived from data supply and distribution, eclipsing traditional share trading activities.
As LSEG gears up to release its full-year financial results on February 29, market observers remain vigilant for any insights into the incident and its potential ramifications on the group’s operational resilience and future strategies.
