Trading at the Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX) — the country’s largest commodity derivatives platform — faced a major technical disruption on Tuesday, October 28, delaying the start of trade by more than four hours.
The session, originally scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m., finally resumed at 1:25 p.m. after the exchange shifted operations to its Disaster Recovery (DR) site, MCX said in an official statement.
“All trading systems are now functioning normally,” the exchange confirmed, adding that it has launched an investigation to determine the cause of the issue.
“We are committed to identifying the cause and implementing corrective measures. Updates on our findings and actions taken will be shared in due course. We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to market participants and appreciate their patience and understanding,” MCX said.
The technical outage weighed on market sentiment, with MCX shares falling 2% to close at ₹9,129.00 on Tuesday.
This is not the first such incident for the exchange. On July 23, trading was also delayed by about an hour due to database-related issues that disrupted overnight clearing operations. MCX had then assured additional system monitoring to prevent similar occurrences.
Under SEBI norms for Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs), delays in restoring normal trading operations can attract penalties of:
- ₹50 lakh if operations aren’t restored within 75 minutes of disruption,
- ₹1 crore if downtime exceeds three hours, and
- ₹2–3 lakh per day for ongoing delays, escalating further if the issue persists.
If an MII delays declaring an incident as a “disaster” beyond 30 minutes, it can face a penalty of ₹2 crore or 10% of average standalone profit from the last two financial years, whichever is higher.
