The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day

Colin Smith writes "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."

Comments

The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day

[Anonymous Coward]

...now if only my wife would do that! /rimshot!

That's okay

[sokoban]

most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year.

Re:That's okay

[morgan_greywolf]

most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year

My wife did that once. Nearly killed me. Come to think of it, it was just after we signed up for the life insurance ...

Re:That's okay

[Xugumad]

Ya laugh, but I've been trying to describe this to people all day...

"The FTSE has crashed!"
"What, like another Black Monday?"
"No, no, crashed, as in gone down!"
"Errr..."

Patch Tuesday

[caluml]

But Patch Tuesday is tomorrow?

Reliability?

[R2.0]

Looks like someone needs to brush up on their buzzwords, specifically "mission critical" and "services no longer required".

Re:99.9967% Uptime if up the next 100 years

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Yeah, because they turn it on when trading starts and turn it off when trading ends.

Re:The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole D

[east coast]

Oh, she does... just not with you.

nudge nudge, wink wink.

performed as expected...

[markana]

"and was designed for increased speed and system capacity"

and see - it went down far faster and more completely than the previous system would have been able to. So that's progress. It's all in how you present it.

5 nines?

[andreyvul]

So their 9.9999% uptime is screwed?

Re:5 nines?

[pancake_lover]

Maybe they should shoot for 9 fives instead. When the problem is too hard, just lower the goal posts.

Nothing taxes can't fix

[heroine]

After the malfunction, TradElect was immediately bought by UK's government for $200 billion and all its debts waved. In an unrelated story, medicare tax was raised yet again because of an unexpected shortfall.

What, no ads?

[Bert64]

Does anyone else remember the "The london stock exchange chose windows 2003 for reliability, they didn't choose linux" ad banners that used to run all over the place, including slashdot if i remember?
Funny how it's all come crashing down...

"The london stock exchange chose windows, but after 7 hours of downtime wishes they had chosen linux".

Re:Oh, my.

[gnick]

The same thing that happened this time?

Re:Oh, my.

[Eudial]

So what happens when this happens again?

Well, first "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
Otherwise, "Are you sure it's plugged in?"

Re:Oh, my.

[cp.tar]

Well, that gives a new meaning to opening Windows to Dungeon Dimensions.

Re:100 years?

[powerlord]

Nah.

They'll be back at "5 nines" by next week.

The trick is to either redefine what the term means (so they are actually referring to 9.9999% uptime), or the timeframe (we've been at "5 nines" for the whole year" - said Jan 1 2009), or both ("so, we use 1 day as a data point, then if we've been up for any part of that day, we're good... so we've always operated at '5 nines' reliability")

Re:The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole D

[mikiN]

What.. what's a wife?

WIFE: Specialized form of WIFI, indicating one of two stations engaged in a (semi-)permanent point-to-point link, the other station typically called HUSBAND. Unsecured transmission often leads to packet loss 9 months after initial association, resulting in long-term elevated QoS requirements. Roaming is usually forbidden by link protocol, although experiments with mesh networks have been reported. DOS attacks often lead to severed links, litigation and possibly material and financial damages.