A Day of Positive Trading Volumes at EBS Despite Platform Outage

Leading currency dealer, EBS, had a day of mixed fortunes, the broker reported good trading activity despite facing technological issues as it suffered a platform outage for a short-period of time.

EBS’s algorithmic and automated trading portal, Ai, the bridge that connects users to its core spot Trading Platform suffered an outage two hours after the London-open, today. The incident occurred at 10:25am according to the broker. The outage occurred for twenty five seconds and only affected a small number of users.

The firm issued a statement confirming the incident: “The EBS platform experienced a service interruption in the London time-zone on 15 October 2014. This only impacted the London Matching Engine, which went down for approximately 25 seconds at 10:25 BST, affecting only a small subset of our London customers.”

EBS's clients connect to the firm's matching engine via connectors, Forex Magnates research shows that a certain number of users were affected by the loss of connectivity.

Fortunately for EBS, the incident occurred during a relatively quiet period, with only one order being affected by the shut-down. However, a spokesperson for the broker stated to Forex Magnates that, today it saw overall good trading activity.

Details of the interruption show that the outage occurred for twenty five seconds before the firm's back-up systems came in-tact. The company’s statement said: “Standard processes have been followed and diagnostics have been checked." In addition, some users were affected for a longer period due to the manual rebooting of their system into the firm's connectors that link the client to the matching engine. The other users were affected for five to seventeen minutes, according to the firm.

EBS, one of the world's largest venues for foreign exchange trading has seen activity take a u-turn back into positive territory in the month of September. In its latest monthly metrics report, it stated that its average daily trading volumes increased by 45% on a YoY basis to $117.9 billion, hitting a fifteen month high.

Platform glitches are a common occurrence in the world of financial trading, one of the most significant incidents was the 2010 flash crash which was partially blamed on high frequency trading, additionally, the Knight Capital glitch became headline news as it saw over $440 million in losses.