Photo/Illutration A monitor displays no price movement on Oct. 1 because of a computer system failure at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. (Tsubasa Setoguchi)

Trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was suspended for the entire day Oct. 1 over a computer glitch discovered before trading was supposed to start in the morning, a first for the exchange.

Officials said they discovered the computer system that transmits stock prices and other information was not working properly so they were forced to halt trading for the day.

Trading was also suspended at the stock exchanges in Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo, which use the same computer system. However, futures trading on the Osaka Stock Exchange continued as usual throughout the day.

The exact cause of the malfunction is not yet known, but officials believe equipment failure was behind the computer problems that caused the suspension.

Securities companies scrambled to call clients who had placed orders and post messages online warning clients about the problem that froze TSE trading.

“There is nothing that securities companies can do. I have never experienced anything like this,” one securities firm official said. “I cannot even imagine if we will be asked for compensation” due to losses that might arise.

The TSE is one of the world’s major stock exchanges with about 3,700 stocks listed.

Suspending trading will have a major impact on domestic and foreign investors, as well as the companies listed on the exchange.

The computer problem made it impossible to calculate the Nikkei 225 and other stock indices coming out of the TSE.

According to TSE officials, they realized stock prices were not appearing on computer displays before 9 a.m., when trading opens, and began looking into the cause. They believe equipment failure was the culprit, rather than a cyberattack or a computer programming problem.

The “Arrowhead” computer system for stock trading has been in place since 2010 and was developed with Fujitsu Ltd.

Fujitsu officials said they are looking into the cause of the problem and trying to discern what kind of malfunction occurred.

The Arrowhead system was totally revamped in November 2019 to improve its processing ability

Fujitsu officials said in developing Arrowhead they relied on lessons learned from a November 2005 computer problem that was caused by a defect in computer software the company developed.

In fiscal 2019, average daily trading volume on the TSE was about 3 trillion yen ($28 billion). But during the early stages of the novel coronavirus pandemic, when stock prices fell across the board, panicked selling pushed up the volume to about 4.9 trillion yen.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said at his Oct. 1 news conference that officials are working on resolving the problem.

“The Financial Services Agency has issued instructions to find the cause and work on restoring operations back to normal,” he said. “It is very regrettable that stock trading could not take place.”

(This article was written by Takufumi Yoshida and Yasuro Suzuki.)

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