Trading systems were down at the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) was down from early this morning Australian time after technical issues brought a stop to activities.

According to the ASX the outage lasted close to four hours. It said the fault, which occurred at 10:05am and was rectified by 2pm, had now been fixed.

“All markets in ASX Trade will reopen from 2pm today and close at the normal times. The markets were halted at 10.05am when ASX detected a connectivity issue,” the ASX said before systems came back online on its website.

By the time the ASX trading systems had gone down, only a handful of trades had cleared, according to a report by Australian newspaper The Australian. It said the problems had been seen with open interfaces that lined market participants to the ASX trading system.

“This is the longest outage ASX has suffered since before the current ASXTrade system was installed in November and caused upset among brokers who had been looking forward to a strong day’s trading after a 1.39 per cent rise on the US market early this morning,” The Australian report said. The ASX also suffered an outage on 28 February this year which lasted just over an hour. ASX’s trading systems vendor is Nasdaq OMX. An ASX spokesperson told Australian IT news site IT Wire that the issue had been detected by traders within minutes of opening the market, which led to a decision by the ASX to turn tits systems off. It has been poor timing for the ASX.

Its newest competitor Chi-X, which pitches itself as a technologically advanced alternative market center and provider of “innovative market level trading solutions” will start trading operations on 31 October.