Proactive Investors - London Stock Exchange said it aims to restore normal trading today after an outage on Thursday halted dealings in shares outside of the FTSE 350.
News of the glitch, which saw trading in AIM shares completely suspended, emerged after 4 pm yesterday with all orders for the stocks affected being expired.
Among those affected were the food delivery group Deliveroo and online fashion retailer ASOS (LON:ASOS).
LSEG did not offer any details on the incident in a statement and said it had no further comment when asked by Reuters, which noted it is the first LSE interruption since 2019.
That outage lasted almost two hours with trading in FTSE 100 and midcap stocks disrupted by a “technical software issue”.
Britain’s stock market used to be one of the jewels in the City crown but since Brexit its premier status in Europe has come under threat from Paris and Amsterdam.
In a bid to boost the appeal of London, changes to listing rules, with the merging of premium and standard classifications, plus reducing the number of issues that require a shareholder vote were confirmed earlier this week by the FCA.
"For a stock exchange, you have one job and that’s to keep your market going. And when these outages do occur, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence," David Morrison, a market strategist at retail broker Trade Nation, told Reuters.
"They haven't given a reason for why this outage occurred ... it's going to take them time to sort out what it was before they can answer," he said.