The Australian share market has opened the week slightly higher, with the corporate regulator confirming that it is investigating an outage that brought trade to a halt last week.
Last Monday the ASX was open for just 24 minutes before its systems froze.
That meant people could not buy or sell any shares for the entire day.
The outage came after the nation’s stock exchange operator updated its software, and came as an embarrassing blow to a platform that prides itself on sophisticated technology.
Corporate regulator ASIC has now announced it will investigate the outage.
In a statement, the ASX said it would “cooperate fully”.
“ASX acknowledges that this is appropriate given ASIC’s regulatory oversight,” it said.
The ASX also confirmed that the issues with its Centre Point had been fixed and that the platform, that allows investors to make anonymous transactions, would be back operational on Tuesday.
Qantas reaches highest share price since COVID crash
By 11:00am AEDT, the ASX 200 was up 0.5 per cent to 6,574 points.
Qantas continued its upwards trend after announcing plans to boost passenger capacity.
The airline said its capacity would rise from 30 per cent of pre-COVID levels, to 40 per cent.
The announcement came after a significant easing of COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria on the weekend, and the official lifting of the hard border between that state and NSW.
Qantas said further easing of restrictions between other states could see its domestic capacity rise to as high as 60 per cent by Christmas.
By 11:00am, its shares were up 1.9 per cent to $5.37.
That was its highest price since its shares crashed to just $2.03 in March, when the Federal Government shut down the entire country and closed borders due to COVID-19.
Energy and technology stocks were also trading up on the news of easing restrictions.
Wall Street closed lower on Friday
US stocks closed lower on Friday as investors wrestled with fiscal stimulus developments, concerns over a lengthy rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, and a growing number of shutdowns there.
Technology companies in demand during lockdowns, such as video conferencing platform Zoom and streaming platform Netflix, helped curb the Nasdaq’s losses and had it settling a bit higher.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and the Dow posted marginal losses for the week.