LSE Failures Blamed on Microsoft

September 9th, 2008 · No Comments

As I suggested yesterday, the meltdown of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was a very fishy affair. The outage was blamed on “connectivity” which suggests network issues, but as I suggested it did not sound plausible because it was not a complete outage, but very spotty services. This to me suggested a database issue.

Well today there has been more information today [WSJ]:

At the heart of the problem appears to be super-fast technology that has become critical to LSE and other exchanges. Traders experienced problems connecting to TradElect, a 15-month-old proprietary LSE platform developed with Microsoft Corp. technology that the LSE has touted as allowing it to expand and speed up its capacity for trades. “Microsoft is working with the London Stock Exchange to understand the root cause of the outage,” said a Microsoft spokesman.

It looks like the trading system Tradelect is in fact the problem. It is based on .Net and C# technology with Microsoft SQL Server as the backend database. Hmmm.. using a departmental database as a real time online transaction engine.

Whoever made the decision to use departmental software for enteprise systems is probably now looking for a new job, I hear Microsoft are looking for “Gurus” for Best Buy stores.

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