Trading in German stocks tripped up by second technical snafu at Deutsche Boerse

The German Stock Exchange operator's electronic trading system blew a fuse on Wednesday morning, leading to a halt in trading across a large swathe of Central and East European equity markets.

It was Deutsche Boerse's second outage of 2020, with trading in derivatives also negative impacted and a sovereign bond auction in Denmark having to be postponed due to the knock-on effect on the Eurex platform for trading in futures.

"The disruption in the T7 system in April and today's failure had the same origin. They were due to faulty third-party software that is part of the trading system," a spokesman for Deutsche Boerse explained.

"We now understand the exact cause and have eliminated the issue. The system is now running stably and we expect it to remain so. External causes can be ruled out."

Floor trading in single stocks did carry on until 1045 BST when trading was set to resume with a 15-minute cash auction.

Yet as of 1030 BST, only 30 of the 99 stocks in Germany's HDAX large and mid-cap index had crossed trades.

Among the other trading venues that suffered as a result were Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana and Zagreb, because they all employ Deutsche Boerse's T7 trading infrastructure.