The London Stock Exchange has been beset with glitches recently, which do not inspire confidence at a time when the very future of the exchange is up for discussion. Anyone accessing the LSE site for four hours on Monday via specific browsers--Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but apparently not the IE)--were greeted with a note wrongly informing them that the site had been identified as unsafe.

The note read: "This website has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked. Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system."

The warning was apparently generated by an online advertisement that unwittingly contained malware. But these sorts of "glitches" are quite distracting. In the immediate aftermath, some people discussed whether Linux was a culprit, which doesn't seem probable.

This episode likely did not go over well in Canada, specifically at the TMX Group, which runs the Toronto Stock Exchange and is considering a merger with the LSE. A previous incident the week before led to lots of hand-wringing about the security of the system that the Toronto exchange may soon join. And just before that, the LSE's Milan exchange was forced to shut for four hours due to a glitch.

All in all, it's getting harder for the LSE to tout technology as a competitive advantage, which its CEO so ardently wants to do.

For more:
- here's the some background from The Telegraph
- here's an article from ComputerWorld

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