It's possible to have one of the most sophisticated trading systems on the continent, with R12 billion in value traded every day, and still have a disaster recovery system that fails.

This is the expensive lesson recently learned by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) when its trading system went down for almost an entire day due to a network problem, which was unspecified at the time of writing. However, commentators say the bourse did what it could and claim that no system is foolproof. On Tuesday, 14 July, the JSE experienced a network problem at about 06h36 that left it unable to disseminate multicast data. In other words, no traders could see the bourse or one another, and the JSE could, therefore, not go live. Initial indications were that the problem was hardware related, but this has not been confirmed. Traders spend the day waiting to go live and were eventually able to do business again at 15h15, with trading hours extended until 19h00. As a result, instead of the normal R12 billion traded, only R5 billion worth of volume was seen - a massive knock for the bourse.