BATS Suffers Glitch on Main Exchange

Stock exchange operator BATS Global Markets said on Tuesday its largest U.S. exchange had an outage that lasted nearly an hour due to an internal network problem, the latest in a spate of technical problems to affect U.S. financial markets.

BATS said it was not able to accept orders to the fully electronic BZX exchange between 1:10 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. Eastern time (1800 GMT). So far this month, the exchange had a 7.63 percent market share of U.S. equities trading.

A BATS spokesman later said all of the systems were back online.

The last major issue on the exchange occurred March 23, 2012, when a software glitch forced BATS to abandon its own initial public offering. BATS said the issue on Tuesday was not related to software.

Exchange operator Direct Edge also had a problem on Tuesday that briefly forced it to stop accepting orders on its EDGX exchange for stocks with symbols ranging from SPYV to TNC.

Direct Edge sent an alert about the issue at 3:00 p.m. ET, saying all open orders had been cancelled. It sent another alert eight minutes later saying its systems were operating normally again.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a sweeping set of rules in March that would require exchanges, clearing agencies and other trading platforms to be better prepared to handle major market disruptions spurred by technology glitches and natural disasters.

The regulator made writing the rule a priority after trading firm Knight Capital Group, which has since been bought by rival firm Getco Holding Co and is now called KCG Holdings Inc (NYSE:KCG), nearly went bust due to a software glitch that led to $461 million in losses.

The Knight debacle was just one incident in a string of high-profile technology errors that plagued the markets in 2012, from Nasdaq OMX Group's botched handling of Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) initial public offering, to the aborted BATS IPO.

Then, in October, the stock market shut down for two days during superstorm Sandy despite contingency plans, in part because of lingering concerns about potential technical issues.

More recently, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (NASDAQ:CBOE) was unable to open for half a day in April due to a software glitch, preventing trading in options on two of the U.S. stock market's most closely watched indexes.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos and John McCrank; Editing by James Dalgleish and Ken Wills)