This is a not-infrequent situation. We have an announcement over the PA system any time an exchange is having technical difficulties. It doesn't happen super often, but I'd say that it happens somewhere in the world one to two times a month.
The exchanges usually bust a bunch of trades that happened right before the outage, depending on the nature of the problem. One would hope that that would be sufficient to prevent abuse for low-risk profits, but I'd probably be the last to know... What happens in Mother Russia stays in Mother Russia.
Also, so did HKEx (for the entire day, on option expiry day!) due to a typhoon (?), as far as I recall.
This is non-news. Exchanges do stop trading unexpectedly sometimes and it's hardly specific to Russia. I'm not sure what was the submitter's interest in it.
I posted here because I find the HN crowd to be ahead of the curve on news like this (security, tech, etc).
For example, previous posts have called this out as a non-event, which I found informative. I learned that exchanges are not as fault-tolerant as I thought. That is why I posted.
It's just a technical failure. The trading was stopped for about 4 hours. After reopening the stock market fell 2.5 percent. No official statement was made about what caused the failure.
The exchanges usually bust a bunch of trades that happened right before the outage, depending on the nature of the problem. One would hope that that would be sufficient to prevent abuse for low-risk profits, but I'd probably be the last to know... What happens in Mother Russia stays in Mother Russia.