Data Vendors Say Glitches Occurred Last Tuesday

In a trading day that saw over two billion shares change hands in the US, some market data vendors experienced glitches and outages last Tuesday, while some did not.

A spokesman for Dow Jones Markets said the vendor experienced no outages or other problems last Tuesday. The spokesman says that after Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan made a comment that roiled the markets this summer, Dow Jones Markets decided to double the capacity of the bandwidth of its network from 128 kilobits/second and upgrade CPU capacity. "We had some blips after Greenspan. Consequently, we made these moves," the spokes man says. "You never know when the test will come."

Dow Jones Markets was not the only vendor that recently beefed up its network. ILX upgraded its network earlier this year to 128 kilobits/second from 56 kilobits/second, says Bernie Weinstein, president and CEO. The vendor also installed servers that allow it to filter the data that is sent to users. "If they're not looking at a particular exchange, we don't transmit the data to them," he says.

ILX is planning to upgrade the capacity of its ticker plant as well, but that was not an issue during last week's heavy traffic. "We did fine," Weinstein says.

A spokesman for Bridge Information Systems says that the vendor had no capacity problems on its network last Tuesday. "We did not lose a tick," he says. However, the volume being transmitted from Bridge's ticker plant exposed a bug that affected Bridgestation users. "Those sites were routed to other servers and so they were only down for a matter of minutes," the spokesman says.

Reuters reported a few short delays during the first hour of US trading on its IDN feed, which feeds the vendor's securities products, including Quotron. During the period from 9:45 a.m. to 10:45 a.m., "there were a couple of instances where IDN suffered delays from 30 seconds to 4 minutes in securities trade and bid and ask data," a spokesman says.

Two vendors--Bloomberg and ADP--did not return calls for comment on how their systems withstood Tuesday's record volume. But a source at one Bloomberg customer in New York says the firm's Bloomberg terminals were down for a short time on Tuesday. The source estimates the time to be more than half an hour, but less than an hour.

This source also says a multiplexer in Reuters' midtown data center went down, resulting in an outage of about 30 minutes that affected Reuters' 52nd St. customers only. "We still had data because we have a backup line from downtown," this source says.

This source says some problems were also introduced by the on-site Selectfeed Plus controller. "The data that was coming in during busy market periods that morning was anywhere between 1 and 5 seconds late," the source says. In addition, some data was dropped, the source says.

For its part, Nasdaq suspended calculation and dissemination of the Nasdaq indexes from 3:17 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, says Tom Davin, director of market data services. That was "related to the volume we were experiencing," he says. "We did not suspend dissemination of trade reports to vendors," Davin says.

About two months ago, Nasdaq began offering higher speed versions of both its Level 1 and Level 2 feeds. Nasdaq also upgraded the Nasdaq Trade Dissemination Service feed, and plans to offer a new format of the feed this quarter (IMD, June 16).

A source close to the New York Stock Exchange says there were no problems with the distribution of transaction data. There was some "slight queuing on some of the [Consolidated Quotation Service] output lines," that resulted, at various points in the day, in delays of 10 to 15 seconds, the source says. The CQS network, which is the process of being upgraded to IP multicast (IMD, March 10), has had periods when it's experienced queuing since 16ths were introduced, the source says.