SINGAPORE, July 14 — It’s safe to say this isn’t how Loh Boon Chye pictured his one-year anniversary as chief executive officer of Singapore Exchange Ltd.

Not only was South-east Asia’s biggest bourse forced to halt stock trading at 11:38am local time today because of a technical malfunction, it failed to follow through on two pledges to restart the market. SGX, which missed targets to reopen at 2pm and 4pm, said trading would remain closed for the rest of the day.

Loh, who took over at SGX on July 14, 2015, replaced Magnus Bocker just a few months after the Swede was forced into a public apology in the wake of two trading halts at SGX in the space of a month. Those mishaps led to a reprimand from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The latest halt is at least the second malfunction at SGX in the past year, after a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August.

"Given the change in CEO and that this has happened again, there may be a bigger problem facing SGX and its back-end systems,” said Bernard Aw, a market strategist at IG Asia Pte.

An SGX spokeswoman referred requests for comment to the five statements the exchange sent on the issue.

Singapore Exchange is home to South-east Asia’s largest stock market, with total capitalisation in the city of US$494 billion (RM2 trillion), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. About S$1.6 billion (RM4.7 billion) of shares changed hands on an average day in the past 12 months. The exchange maintains a monopoly on stock trading in Singapore.

Among the equities halted were DBS Group Holdings Ltd and Singapore Airlines Ltd.

"This should have been sorted as it happened a few years back as well,” said Alex Wijaya, a senior sales trader at CMC Markets. "The communication and handling of this incident could have been better.”

SGX isn’t alone in suffering from technical errors. Malfunctions at Deutsche Boerse AG, Europe’s biggest derivatives exchange, disrupted trading in February and July 2015, while there was a one-hour halt in trading on Euronext NV’s derivatives products in March last year. The New York Stock Exchange had an outage a year ago that lasted 3½ hours.

"It’s unforeseen and nobody likes this,” said Melinda Sam, chief executive officer of the Securities Association of Singapore. "We just hope that SGX can improve on the technology.” — Bloomberg