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More pain for the listed equities in ASX Ltd (ASX:ASX), the share market operator itself, after a Monday morning glitch saw some 50 companies hit with an inability to release announcements to market, including price-sensitive announcements, as what appears to be an aging tech system at the national bourse operator causing yet another very visible bungle.
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At least this time it’s just the announcement delivery software having a bad day and not the fundamental ability to buy and sell shares as was the case around this time of year not that many moons ago.
HotCopper reached out to (now-delisted) National Stock Exchange CEO Max Cunningham, a former ASX insider, to get a sense of his take sitting at the helm of an emerging competitor to Helen Lofthouse’s ASX.
(Fun fact, the NSX recently merged with the Canadian Securities Exchange, which you can watch a video on here.)
“This is a worrying recurrence of a range of ongoing technological issues for the best part of a decade,” Cunningham said, nodding at the company’s ongoing CHESS software replacement issues.
ASIC has taken the ASX to court in recent history as the bourse remains in bad stead with the regulator due to the still-ongoing fisaco of its CHESS software replacement shambles.
“This year we’ve already seen market disclosure issues with TPG Telecom,” Cunningham added, alluding to a situation earlier this year where the ASX effectively confused TPG Telecom for a different company, all in all, seeing TPG’s share price decline -5%.
“[These problems] go back to last year’s CHESS outage, and there doesn’t appear to be any accountability.”
But forget share price pain, whether that of ASX Ltd’s or its constituents, because the board at the ASX may have more to worry about. We’ve learned this morning that ASIC and the ASX are “engaged” in a conversation about the problem.
Read: ASIC is asking the ASX what on earth is is going on, marking yet another instance ASX Ltd has come to bow its head before ASIC in quite a short amount of time.
Curiously, though probably coincidentally, there was a somewhat similar situation on Friday night local time when key CMC-run servers that effectively manage the US futures market reportedly overheated, meaning that around early Friday morning US time, the futures market was more or less broken.
Update: Monday 1 December 1PM AEDT
US-based and ASX-listed BNPL fintech Ovanti Ltd (ASX:OVT) has been one of the companies affected by the ASX’s outage on Monday.
The company has been unable to release a keystone announcement on Monday morning, which has now led to the company fielding concerns – fairly so – from both retail and institutional shareholders.
“We are due to announce a very large milestone transaction for the company regarding our US BNPL business,” an Ovanti Ltd CEO representative said of today’s ASX outage.
“Many of our shareholders are retail shareholders, in addition to institutional. We’ve been receiving many shareholder enquires and it is frustrating that we don’t know what to say to them regarding the situation.”
Update: Monday 1 December 1.45pm AEDT
Heading into the second leg of afternoon trades, stocks in ASX Ltd have fallen further to reflect an intraday decline of over -2.3%.
The number of companies thought to be affected on Monday now sits higher than the originally estimated 50 companies with 80 companies now believed to have been hit by the morning outage.
Metcash (ASX:MTS) and Ovanti Ltd (ASX:OVT) are two companies whose operations have been disrupted; while both the ASX and ASIC have issued statements to some press outlets, neither company has made a dedicated media (or market disclosure) announcement.
However, the ASX has established a rolling ‘status update’ webpage with relevant information, though, no real explanation.
Update: Tuesday 2 December 3.30PM AEDT
In the final hours of the Tuesday trading session it looks like the ASX’s announcement outage problem is over, though, whether or not the bourse sees further consequences stemming from this remains to be seen.
“All announcements are processing as expected today, 2 December 2025,” the company wrote on Tuesday morning.
“All price-sensitive announcements lodged on 1 December 2025 have been successfully submitted and published.”
We haven’t had much word from ASIC on the matter outside of reports it had approached representatives from the bourse on Monday.
The ASX itself, perhaps unsurprisingly, will likely be hoping the market forgets this episode.
That will likely take some time to happen, given it appears many still remember the trading outage roughly a year ago that meant people couldn’t buy or sell shares on at least one trading day, which went down about as well as you’d expect.
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