ET NOW today on March 1, 2021, reported that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “The glitch was not anticipated but it cost us much. May be there was an interoperability issue between the two exchanges,” referring to February 27, 2021, when the National Stock Exchange halted trading after it started facing unmanageable telecommunication connectivity issues.
Market regulator Sebi issued a notice to the NSE on the very same day asking why the Exchange decided not to shift to the Disaster Recovery (DR) Site which exists for this very reason. The NSE defended its action by saying that telecommunication failure had also affected its disaster management system making it equally unusable as the main site.
The NSE then released a statement saying – “Post shut down of trading on NSE, we considered all the available options on hand including invocation of DR to decide on the course of action that would bring up the market at the earliest with least disruption to market participants and post evaluation, a decision was taken to bring up the systems at the primary site.”
Further adding to its defense, the NSE also gave the example of a few other outages that have occurred in global markets including Australia’s ASX glitch on November 16, 2020, Japan’s JPX outage and a few others.