February 24, 2021 was the biggest trading outage in India’s history. The market regulator has asked the exchange to do a root-cause analysis as to why the operations were not transferred to backup sites.
When NSE teams found out that the leased-lines of the exchange were not pumping data, they decided to restart the system. But, as mentioned earlier, both the companies’ services went down at the same time and this made the migration of operations from Mumbai to Chennai difficult.
Consequently, the exchange had to halt trading claiming, "issues with the links with telecom service providers."
All this time, the competitor of NSE, BSE (formerly known as Bombay Stock Exchange) was working fine and fresh equity trades could be executed there.
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Zerodha, the largest broker in India, claims that there was no intimation from NSE on any expected time of resumption of services. Thus, it and all other brokers squared-off open intraday positions with opposite trades in BSE.
However, just minutes before the standard market closing time of 3:30 pm the exchange announced that a special trading session will be run.
The next day i.e. today is the weekly as well as the monthly expiry and many traders in the Futures and Options segment would have wanted to square-off their contracts. Thus, the restlessness in investors and traders all over the nation and the world can be imagined.
The question now is that will this incident prove to be a boon for the rival BSE?