Trading in some stock options halted for second time in a week as exchanges hit by outage

By Joseph Adinolfi

Trading in some U.S. equity options was briefly halted on Wednesday as a critical piece of the options-market plumbing suffered its second outage in a week.

A processing issue at the Options Price Reporting Authority, an entity that collects and aggregates data on options trades from the 16 U.S. options exchanges, forced Cboe Global Markets -- which operates four of those exchanges, including the largest by volume, Cboe Options Exchange -- to temporarily suspend trading in so-called multilisted options, which trade on multiple exchanges, according to a statement on the exchange operator's website.

A representative for Cboe told MarketWatch that a similar issue caused an outage last Thursday, and that other exchanges were likely affected as well. MarketWatch was unable to reach OPRA for comment and did not hear back from other U.S. options-exchange operators.

A statement posted to OPRA's website following the previous outage blamed data-center problems.

Outages caused by Wednesday's disruption raised eyebrows on social media, including on Reddit and X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter. Some users complained that they were briefly trapped in single-stock options positions.

Cboe suffered a major outage in April 2013 that disrupted trading in some of the world's most popular derivatives contracts, according to media reports. That incident halted trading in options tied to the Cboe Volatility Index VIX as well as Cboe's S&P 500 Index SPX options, the most popular equity-options product traded in the U.S.

-Joseph Adinolfi

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10-25-23 1417ET

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