Australian Stock Exchange Rocked by Another Outage: Dozens of Stocks Halted Amid Publishing Glitch

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) suffered a technical outage on Monday, December 1, 2025, that disrupted its corporate announcements platform. Because of the malfunction, trading in roughly 80 companies had to be paused, as they were unable to publish market-sensitive disclosures scheduled for release that morning.

The issue arose shortly before 9:00 a.m. in Sydney, creating significant delays and irritation among investors who were waiting for numerous updates. One notable example was Metcash: although the company discussed its interim results with analysts, it was unable to upload the formal presentation, forcing a temporary suspension of its shares.

ASX stated that it implemented an initial fix allowing it to process announcements submitted after 11:22 a.m., though earlier filings remained stuck in the backlog. The exchange apologized for the disruption, stressing that trading in the affected stocks would resume only after each pending announcement had been properly published. It also indicated that core settlement and clearing systems continued to operate normally and that preliminary checks did not point to a cybersecurity cause.

This episode adds to a series of operational and governance concerns that have attracted scrutiny from regulators such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

In recent years, the exchange has faced several high-profile issues. In August 2025, it incorrectly linked a major technology company to an unrelated takeover notice, triggering canceled trades and erasing more than A$400 million in market value for the wrongly identified firm. Two months earlier, ASIC launched a broad review into the ASX’s governance and risk controls after persistent systems problems and the collapse of a long-running technology upgrade. The CHESS settlement platform malfunctioned in December 2024, delaying trade settlements and prompting the Reserve Bank of Australia to question the robustness of the exchange’s critical systems. Additionally, ASIC has taken legal action over alleged misrepresentations about progress on the CHESS replacement project and previously fined the ASX A$1.1 million in March 2024 for repeated failures to publish required pre-trade information.

The market reacted negatively to the latest outage, with ASX’s share price dropping as much as 2.9 percent in early trading—its steepest decline since mid-August. The broader financial industry was already on edge following a multi-hour shutdown at CME Group days earlier due to cooling problems at a data center. ASIC reported that it was monitoring the ASX disruption and remained in communication with the exchange.