LSE Halts

The problem is that the LSE can't hire top tier talent. There are plenty of people who are experts in building hugely concurrent and fail-safe exchange software, and they pretty much all work for investment banks.<p>The LSE can't afford to compete with $1000/day salaries so they end up hiring second-tier developers. And unfortunately second-tier developers are a lot lot worse than first-tier developers.

Does anyone know if this halt is related to the recent switch over to the new Linux based platform? (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686116" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686116</a>)

"And as a final note, solely for the seriously nerdy techies, there's been some talk about the failure being due to F# error."<p><a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/marketslive/" rel="nofollow">http://ftalphaville.ft.com/marketslive/</a>

"Continuous trading has now resumed in all order driven trading services."

Sri Lanka? <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/09/16/uk-lse-it-sb-idUKTRE58F4TC20090916" rel="nofollow">http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/09/16/uk-lse-it-sb-idUKTR...</a> (via /B @ftalphaville comments)

Nothing official yet. (<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9bf8033a-40bb-11e0-9a37-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1ExjV27Jt" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9bf8033a-40bb-11e0-9a37-00144feabd...</a>)

What if all these systems were open sourced? Including all the load tests.

Where is the fail over? If ever a system needed 99.9999...

this is the official place for updates, although its not very responsive at the moment,probably due to load <a href="http://liveservice.londonstockexchangegroup.com/en/incidents/active/lse" rel="nofollow">http://liveservice.londonstockexchangegroup.com/en/incidents...</a>

I wonder if it's HFT related? A group of rogue algorithms gone exponential? There are certainly people worried about that...