This is risk management? outage time: 75 minutes, cost $80 billion!

Late last week, the Sydney Futures Exchange gave 45 minutes notice of a lunchtime outage for an "urgent hardware rectification". In a market reporting good financial results, how could this have any impact? According to one press article, the outage was because new hardware was installed. Another article reported a backup computer database was faulty, and replacement was a safer option than risking continued trading. I want to know who did this risk assessment. It was the heaviest trading day on record, and volumes have been increasing steadily, growing 20% in the last 12 months alone. The system itself is 18 years old, but hopefully the hardware is newer!

So what could happen in 75 minutes? Australian Stock Exchange traders were not able to hedge trades on the futures market, so handled risk by dumping stock. Ten billion dollars a minute was being trimmed off the stock market. While there was a significant recovery when service was restored, there was still a massive loss. The explanatory media announcement from the SFE seemed to be talking about something completely different, "Thursday's incident was an unforeseeable network connection failure, not a matter to do with the design of the application."
At least no one mentioned "computer error". I wonder if SFE are overhauling their risk assessment procedures now. I hope so........ I'd also hope that they learn a little about hot swapping........