SINGAPORE, July 14 — Singapore Exchange Ltd halted all equities trading on its market today morning and missed a self-imposed target to resume, leaving investors in the dark about when the US$494 billion (RM1.9 trillion) market will reopen.

The bourse said the halt was caused by duplicated trade confirmation messages. Trading was scheduled to restart at 2pm, but the exchange later said this would not happen.

"Member reconciliation files are being generated and the securities market will not resume trading at 1400 hours,” the exchange operator said. "We will advise the market resumption time once member reconciliation is completed.”

It’s at least the second malfunction to affect SGX’s systems in the past year. There was a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August after a technical fault.

In 2014, the Monetary Authority of Singapore reprimanded SGX for two trading disruptions that occurred a year earlier, a blow for the bourse operator under former Chief Executive Officer Magnus Bocker. He was replaced in July 2015 by Loh Boon Chye, formerly Bank of America Corp’s head of Asia-Pacific global markets.

"It’s not the first time it’s happened in Singapore,” said Steven Leung, executive director at UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Ltd.  

"Hong Kong may be better — I don’t remember when Hong Kong had such a suspension because of technical issues — but people will forget about such events after some time.” — Bloomberg