London Stock Exchange crippled by system outage

reuters.com

6 points·rms··9 comments

When I was in college (not that long ago) I had a COBOL class. I learned exactly one thing from that class: It is astonishingly...astonishingly...easy to fuck up financial apps. If you see a webpage where the margins are off, or the text doesn't align...that's bad. But in a financial app, the equivilent bug amounts to catastrophe.

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-...

From the article: "The new platform has been designed to the highest levels of resilience with comprehensive back up, which includes dual processing at two sites and recovery from component failure within a second."

Hmm...where was the recovery? Did it mention anywhere why the recovery didn't occur? I'm guessing, though, that the company won't actively explain what failed or why.

Hmmmm.... Maybe we should run the test suite one more time before we deploy.

Windows priorities have been 1. Usability 2. Features 3. Performance

Unix priorities have been 1. Features 2. Performance 3. Usability

And they chose windows over linux for Reliability: http://www.idgconnect.com/software/windows/london_stock_exch...

Windows doesn't take 8 hours to reboot. I'm gonna guess that it was some data corruption or hardware failure that forced a rebuild of some large database node.

Probably caused by a faulty wind generating turbine.

the trading bots did it on purpose - they are taking control of the system

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