SINGAPORE, July 15 — The technical malfunction that hit the Singapore Exchange (SGX) on Thursday (July 14) and forced the local bourse to shut its doors mid-trading was triggered by a hardware issue, SGX said in a conference call today.

"The issue is different from 2014. The trade confirmation processes was discovered with a trigger to a hardware, which we then subsequently recovered and focused on reconciling positions with members which took longer than anticipated but we were very focused on that minimising downtime and reopening the market as soon as we can,” SGX’s CEO Loh Boon Chye said at the media conference call.

"I wish to sincerely apologise on behalf of SGX for the many inconveniences I am aware we have caused to our members, traders, investors and partners. We are not pleased with our own recovery time and it has to be better and we will do better,” Loh said.

Investors who short their positions yesterday will be waived of buy-in penalties, as the amount of short-selling seen yesterday was "insignificant,” said Loh. Those who have short their positions yesterday can recover their positions today as the market is open, Loh responded to an enquiry.

Yesterday’s disruption took place smack on CEO Loh’s first-year anniversary at SGX. Loh took over the helm at SGX on July 14 last year, replacing Magnus Bocker, who had been CEO since 2009. Bocker left SGX several months after making a public apology on December 2014, following two trading disruptions in as many months.

On Nov 5, 2014, SGX declared a formal trading halt at 2.51pm, citing a disruption in power supply. The securities trading platform reopened more than two hours later, while the derivatives market reopened at 7pm. Barely a month later on Dec 3, SGX opened its securities market 3.5 hours late because of a software error.

Yesterday, trading in SGX’s securities market was suspended since 11.38am after trade confirmation messages were found to be duplicated.

The local bourse subsequently said it was planning to resume trading at 2pm but did not as the process to reconcile the missing and duplicate messages resulted in a longer process than anticipated. It then postponed trading to open at 4pm, but at 4.01pm, SGX told the market it would not reopen for the day.

Trading resumed as per normal today. The Straits Times Index (STI) was up 0.82 per cent or 23.74 points to 2,930.66 at 9.01am.

By midday, the STI was up 0.69 per cent, or 19.93 points, at 2926.85. — TODAY