Johannesburg — The JSE says two broken Data cables between Belgium and London caused the outage that stopped trade for six hours and the bourse is "exploring its options"

The JSE says two broken cables between Amsterdam and London caused the outage that stopped trade for six hours

According to the the JSE's Robin Tucker, there were what he calls a series of failures including a cable break in Belgium where the MTN Business Data link between London and Amsterdam was terminated.

MTN continues to investigate what exactly caused the line to break.

Tucker says there was a simultaneous break in the fibre optic cable between Amsterdam and the SAT-3 cable to London.

And to add insult to injury, there was a third or additional cable fault between Amsterdam and Telehouse in London

"The investigation continues, it was exceptional that we experienced four faults at once," says Tucker.

"MTN are busy going through the scenarios to see what alternatives could be provided, but to have four layers of redundancy fail simultaneously is highly unusual."

The back up system, Seacom, has been unavailable for some time as it experiences maintenance issues.

So when the SAT-3 system failed, there was no proper alternative method to exchange data across the continents.

The effect of the multiple breakdowns caused public trading to halt for most of Tuesday 27th.

Tucker has also sounded a note of caution, saying that while MTN Business remains the partner supplying connectivity, the JSE is "exploring its options".

Its not the first time this month that trading has been hit by an MTN outage.

It said that although a network issue had also caused the closure of the cash equities market for 90 minutes on July 12 , the JSE and MTN had not yet been able to determine the root cause of that incident.

"The findings of the independent experts appointed in this regard are awaited and will be communicated once the investigation has been concluded," the JSE said.

"MTN Business has taken remedial action to resolve the technical issue and will take further action in the following weeks based on its analysis of the cause, including an enhanced monitoring system," the group said on Thursday.