India's National Stock Exchange, the world’s largest derivatives exchange by trading volume, went down this week following a technical glitch.

The four hour outage and lack of communication is thought to have led to a panic sell-off, leading to investor losses.

Going down faster than shares in GameStop

Server crash failure error outage
– Thinkstock

“NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy and we have received communication from both the telecom service providers that there are issues with their links due to which there is an impact on NSE system,” the stock exchange said in a statement.

National market regulator The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) asked NSE to conduct an immediate root-cause analysis and submit a report.

“In view of the exceptional situation arising out of the ‘trading halt’, it was decided to extend the trading hours from 3.30pm to 5.00pm at the NSE, BSE, and MSEI,” SEBI said.

Amid the outage, panicked investment brokers began closing intra-day equity positions on another exchange, causing significant losses.

This week also saw the US Federal Reserve's interbank payment system go down, putting hundreds of billions of dollars of transfers on hold.

Outages have taken down the London Stock Exchange, NYSE, Nordic Nasdaq, Singapore Stock Exchange, Tokyo Stock Exchange, and others.

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