WELLINGTON: Trading on the New Zealand stock exchange is under scrutiny to prove its resilience after cyber attacks halted trading for a third straight day on Thursday, frustrating investors as companies report earnings and the market nears a record high.
Exchange operator NZX was forced to impose another trading halt on Thursday morning, citing connectivity issues, following similar outages the two previous days that it attributed to cyber attacks from abroad.
The disruptions come at the worst possible time, with companies such as national carrier Air New Zealand reporting their first annual results since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The timing is not ideal,” said Michael De Cesare, a portfolio manager at Nikko Asset Management in Auckland. “Fund managers generally will be looking to be more active in response to the substantial new information being released to market. So clearly the disruption constrains that ability.”
Commerce Minister Kris Faafoi and the Financial Markets Authority, which regulates NZX, have both been in touch with the exchange over the incidents.
The market was disrupted for the final hour of trading on Tuesday and again for more than three hours yesterday. Thursday’s outage began at 11.24am in Wellington (6.24am Bangkok). The benchmark S&P/NZX-50 index was up 0.2% at 12,053, closing in on a record high of 12,073.
An earlier report quoted a spokesman saying the exchange reopened at 3pm, but NZ Ltd said later the bourse remained shut, Reuters reported.
NZX pointed to network connectivity issues from the cyber attacks and said it was hoping to resume on Friday.
"This decision not to re-open has been made while we focus on addressing the situation," the bourse said in a statement.
NZX has issued only brief statements to confirm the trading halts and that it was working with service provider Spark New Zealand to fix connectivity issues. It has said that the incidents on Tuesday and Wednesday were caused by “volumetric distributed denial of service attacks from offshore” -- an attempt to disrupt service by saturating a network with significant volumes of internet traffic.
“Minister Faafoi is being kept updated on the situation and has spoken with the exchange,” his spokesman said today. “He has been advised it is working with its internet service provider on a security solution and has asked to be kept informed.”