The Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) website crashed on Monday morning prompting those in the industry to raise issues about the regulator’s professionalism in how it operates, while the exchange says presently it is taking steps to minimize the downtime(restoring service) ‘if it happens again’.
“The Colombo market is doing well and there is more and more interest in our shares. The least CSE can do is invest in the necessary infrastructure and maybe upgrade it, etc. Hopefully this is an isolated incident,” one broker said. The website was not restored till late evening on the same day.
A CSE official told the Sunday Times FT that the website crashed due to a server failure. “We are currently taking steps to minimize the downtime if it happens again,” the official said. An analyst said it is a ‘serious lapse’ – especially at a juncture where the rest of the world is watching the CSE. “Some high networth investors had issues, but there were many who had information to trade through their brokers’ own websites,” he noted.
He said small investors who usually move the market were affected by the website crash to a large extent.
An investor said that Sri Lanka needs IT knowledge and new systems to compete with the world and it would be best to strengthen the IT infrastructure, so that the CSE will not have to face such situations in the future.
However another investor noted that the CSE website is on par with the best around the world. “Not so long ago, the computers in the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange crashed and nobody presumed they were not good IT infrastructures,” she said. |
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