BATS Europe Confronts System Outage

BATS Europe is confronting “system issues.” The pan-European trading venue operated by BATS Global Markets went down at 9:36 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

The multilateral trading facility said the outage was “due to an external hardware issue.’’ But it did not specify the system component involved or the supplier of the hardware.

The incident occurred at the Equinix LD4 data center in London.

In October, BATS Europe said it “successfully completed” the migration of its matching engine and infrastructure to the LD4 data center.

That move was made in anticipation of the completion of BATS Global Markets’ planned acquisition of larger rival Chi-X Europe, which operates out of LD4.

BATS had operated at a Savvis data center in London’s Docklands district since launching in 2008.

BATS announced the completion of the Chi-X Europe acquisition on Thursday. “The issue did not affect the Chi-X Europe platform, which is operating as normal,’’ said BATS spokeswoman Kelly Bailey.

BATS Global Markets now operates in Europe as BATS Chi-X Europe. The two platforms account for about one-fourth of all pan-European trading.

The Lenexa, Kansas, operator of trading venues in the United States and Europe said it will move the Chi-X trading operations onto BATS trading technology by the end of June next year.

BATS said it is working with its hardware vendor to resolve the problem and plans to restart trading today.

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld writes for Securities Technology Monitor.