Oct 02 (NHK) - Tokyo Stock Exchange officials have announced the bourse will reopen on Friday after a technical glitch halted trading for the whole day on Thursday.
The problem prevented the system from sending out stock prices and trading data, and forced officials to call off trading shortly before the exchange was due to open at 9 AM.
The officials said they were planning to replace hardware in time to have the TSE reopen on Friday morning.
Earlier, TSE President and CEO Miyahara Koichiro apologized to investors for the outage.
Miyahara said, "We feel a great sense of responsibility. We will conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of the problem and do whatever is necessary to ensure it doesn't happen again."
He conceded the timing was unfortunate given the government is considering a plan to create an international financial center within Japan.
The outage meant investors were unable to trade any of the roughly 3,700 shares listed on the exchange. Brokerages across the country were inundated with calls from customers.
Exchanges in Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo also shut for the day. They use the same system as Tokyo to execute trades. The exchange in Osaka was the exception. It remained open.
This is the first time the TSE has shut down for an entire day since trading was fully computerized in 1999.
The system was developed by Japanese tech giant Fujitsu. The company says it's looking into the problem.
