London Stock Exchange outage blamed on Microsoft

The WSJ reports that yesterday's 7 hour outage at the LSE is due to a proprietary platform based on Microsoft technologies.

At the heart of the problem appears to be super-fast technology that has become critical to LSE and other exchanges. Traders experienced problems connecting to TradElect, a 15-month-old proprietary LSE platform developed with Microsoft Corp. technology that the LSE has touted as allowing it to expand and speed up its capacity for trades. "Microsoft is working with the London Stock Exchange to understand the root cause of the outage," said a Microsoft spokesman.

Realistically, this could have happened with any technology choice, but it's amazing to me that the LSE is not all *nix. Details are fuzzy, so maybe this is just a desktop as opposed to a core trading system.

As Julian Goldsmith reports, this month was also the deadline for TradElect to reach 10,000 continuous messages per second. That's a pretty significant number and I can't point to a Microsoft success story processing that kind of volume.

[fakherhalim]

I don't think it is fair to even suggest that Microsoft has any role in this crash.
Particularly the .NET platform is very solid, and we should wait for their findings before speculating.

[alegr]

Yes, if a buggy third party software system runs on top of Microsoft Windows and fails, that's Microsoft fault.

[paulej]

That claim is funny. Many of us here are programmers and, while Microsoft has its share of bugs, we all know that most programmers do no better. So, somebody wrote an application with Microsoft technologies and it breaks... and they blame Microsoft? There is no possibility that perhaps the programmer made a mistake? Without details, it is hard to say who is at fault, but it is hard for me to believe that Microsoft is entirely to blame on this one.

[storm14k]

I could be wrong but from my reading it looks like MS helped put this solution together if soley put it together. If that were the case then yes MS could be to blame for their products and engineering.

[Sumatra-Bosch]

Fools. Using a toy operating system for a MC application like this is an invitation to disaster. With Windows it is not a matter of if it will explode - but when.