Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) will continue to work with information vendors to ensure the industry is adequately prepared should any automatic Market Data Feed (MDF) system failover and automatic recovery happen in the future, as it assesses the impact of yesterday’s MDF system process failover.

There was an automatic MDF system process failover at around 2:35 pm in the afternoon yesterday that triggered failover from production line to secondary line for 22 information vendors. 

The incident did not disrupt the operation of HKEx’s MDF system.  Moreover, HKEx’s securities market trading system was not affected.    

The services of vendors with dual production lines connected to the MDF system were unaffected.  However, HKEx understood the services to clients of some information vendors were interrupted during the incident. Details of the impact on information vendors affected by the incident and those unaffected are in the following table.  

During the incident, HKEx contacted those information vendors who were not able to complete the line failover in a short period of time.

HKEx reckons the delay in the market data updates experienced by some investors might differ from the period of disconnection recorded by HKEx’s system and vary from vendor to vendor as the system settings of the information vendors and their customers involved are not the same.

Meanwhile, HKEx has noted that today’s news reports included some inaccuracies in respect of yesterday’s market and MDF operations. HKEx wishes to clarify that the MDF’s design enables vendors to catch up on any missed market data messages after their connections to the MDF are restored following interruptions.  Any anomalous quotes which appear after the reconnections are due to the set-up of individual vendor systems.     

HKEx is planning a mandatory automatic MDF failover rehearsal for information vendors for early next year.  HKEx has arranged market rehearsals on automatic failover for information vendors and other market participants from time to time and the last failover rehearsals were conducted in late October this year. HKEx will strictly enforce the requirement for information vendors to participate in mandatory market rehearsals in order to ensure any future failover will be seamless.

HKEx will also review its minimum requirements for information vendors to ensure they have adequate recovery arrangements and resilience to minimise service disruption to the market should similar events happen in the future.