Another major UK financial institution has been hit by a failure of its IT, following on from the London Stock Exchange's suspension of trading at 3.04pm on 9 November after a server outage. This time it was Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) whose data centre in Yorkshire suffered a power failure in the early hours of Saturday 14 November, after severe gales hit the UK, crashing the bank's cash machines, branch and online banking systems.

Early morning shoppers faced having their HBOS cards rejected in shops after the power failure and the bank's entire ATM system went down following the storms. In the branch things weren't much better as employees had to record transaction details with pen and paper because current account systems were also down - a maximum of £200 counter withdrawals was in force until service began to be restored mid-morning onwards.

An HBOS spokesperson said: "Power was restored to the centre via our back up generators in the late morning and all systems, including cash machines, were running normally as of 14.30". Online banking services, however, still had intermittent access problems as evening approached. The spokesperson apologised "for the disruption and inconvenience".

• In other news, the LSE outage on 9 November halted trading in almost 300 UK stocks. The exchange released a statement saying it was "investigating an issue with our trading and information platforms, which continues to impact 1/12 of London instruments" - the problem is thought to relate to the failure of a HP server, disrupting the systems.

Trading was stopped at 3.04pm until the close of day as the LSE decided there wasn't sufficient time to get it up and running, although all systems were back to normal by the next day. The price of stocks at 3.04pm was taken as the closing price [for affected stocks] and users were informed to complete a full reference data download; purge unexecuted orders; confirm the deletion via an 'own order book download'; and resubmit all off-book trade reports where an acknowledgement was not forthcoming.

Technical glitches and failures have been a problem in the past for the LSE and it no doubt can't wait to get rid of its TradElect and Infolect platforms, which will be replaced by its newly acquired systems provider MillenniumIT. The planned upgrade is needed to fend off pressure from alternative trading venues, such as Chi-X, which have been eating up market share since they came on the scene. As part of the same need, LSE is also talking to the bank-owned Turquoise platform about a possible takeover deal, with the intention of merging it with the LSE's Baikal dark pool, giving the group a presence in the non-displayed trades market.

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