Systems failure at Reuters hits forex trading

Reuters suffered a temporary systems failure in its currency matching system, the Reuters Dealing 3000 Matching Host, which caused a disruption in foreign exchange (FX) trading during Asian hours on Friday, September 8, confirm Reuters officials and industry traders.

The outage serves as a firm reminder of the competitive landscape for interbank business, with rival broker EBS picking up volume, say FX traders.

The systems outage took place between 1:20am GMT (2:20am UK time and 9:20pm New York time), and lasted an hour before recovery at 3:20pm GMT, says a spokesperson for Reuters in London. The spokesperson says trading in sterling as well as Australian and New Zealand dollar currencies were affected.

"A lot of our feeds for our internal systems come directly from Reuters, so there were some ongoing implications," says a Singapore-based trader. The trader says that volumes naturally migrate to rival broker EBS as a result.

One head of trading adds: "Both Reuters and EBS as the primary sources of liquidity know that, at any time they go down, the liquidity switches immediately to the other one, so they are losing from the second the system fails."