Down and up and down again at UBS

It has happened to every provider of electronic trading platforms, but that doesn’t lessen the embarrassment of a system crash. This week, it was the turn of UBS, whose FXTrader went down on Tuesday. “During a programme of major systems enhancements, we experienced a rare outage yesterday in one of our FX systems, which resulted in a period of reduced service for some clients. The impacted clients were promptly informed and normal service was swiftly resumed once the problem had been rectified,” is the official spin. What I hear is that the platform went down, came back up briefly, and then crashed again, resulting in a downtime of around a couple of hours.