Trading at the Helsinki Stock Exchange and Nasdaq exchanges across the Nordic and Baltic equity and fixed-income markets did not open on Wednesday morning on time due to a fire alarm system knocking out the exchange's data centre in Väsby, north of Stockholm, Sweden. As of publication time at 2:46 pm Wednesday Helsinki's Nasdaq exchange remained closed.
Update: Trading was resumed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange a little before 4 pm on Wednesday.
Nasdaq Helsinki president Mikael Husman said that share trading could be out-of-order for several hours, but said he hoped the problem would still be remedied on Wednesday.
Financial news outlet Bloomberg reports the delay was due to "severe connection issues" in equipment caused by an automatic fire extinguishing sprinkler system at the Väsby data centre.
Regulators to probe incident
Maria Rekola of Finland's Financial Supervisory Authority told Bloomberg that there is a backup system but that it appears to be taking a long time to get it operational, saying the authority plans to investigate the delay.
The outage affected trades in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn and Vilnius. Nasdaq said any trades that were made today would be cancelled, according to Bloomberg.
The only exchange in the Nordics which has been operational during the outage is Oslo in Norway, which is independent and not part of Nasdaq.
Story revised at 4:03 pm to reflect that trading on the Helsinki Stock Exchange had resumed.