Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock exchange, the biggest equities market in the Middle East, resumed trading services after a technical glitch caused a temporary outage on Wednesday.
"Saudi Exchange would like to announce that the technical issue has been resolved and trading services are now functioning normally. The trading has been resumed with auction till 01.00 pm," the bourse said following the disruption.
"The Saudi Exchange would like to apologise for any inconvenience this issue may have caused and assures you that it will always take all necessary measures to ensure market efficiency and fairness."
Tadawul had earlier suspended equity trading services due to a "technical issue out of the company’s control". The exchange did not specify what the problem was but said it was working to rectify the technical issue as soon as possible.
When contacted by The National, the chief executive's office also confirmed the outage but did not provide any additional details and directed all further queries to its marketing department.
Tadawul, which is home to over 200 listed firms including Saudi Aramco, is among the top 10 global stock markets with a market capitalisation of $2.6 trillion.
Last month, it changed its corporate structure and converted itself into a holding company ahead of its initial public offering later this year. It will become only the third publicly-traded regional stock exchange after the Dubai Financial Market and Boursa Kuwait.
Many global exchanges have experienced outages, which are mainly caused by cyber attacks or software and hardware glitches. Attacks are capable of halting trading activity for hours or even days.
In October, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the world's third largest bourse, experienced its worst disruption after halting trading for an entire day due to a hardware breakdown.
A cyber attack on the New Zealand stock exchange halted trading for more than four days in August while Canada's biggest stock exchange operator, TMX Group, had a major outage in February because of hardware failure.
In November 2019, Nasdaq’s Nordic and Baltic stock markets were also disrupted due to connectivity problems.
The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in five stocks, including Amazon and Alphabet, in April 2018 due to a technical glitch.