Last year around this time, microsoft started a aggressive campaign against linux called getthefacts.com. The biggest and the most important “fact” was the London Stock Exchange article, which showed how the trading company choose Microsoft over Linux for “scalable, reliable and high-performance” solution.

Monday was supposed to be a big day at the LSE. The U.S. government had announced on the Sunday before that it was coming to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Trading would have been extremely brisk, but then, at 9:15 AM, to the horror of all the traders at NSE the whole NSE system and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange just crashed. Connectivity errors were everywhere. It took 6 hours and 45 minutes to get the system back up. As Reuters reported, “We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world … and then we can’t trade. It’s terrible,” one trader said. Billions of dollars lost, who’s to blame?
The sytems run on a .NET framework with backends running SQL 2000 and SQL 2003. The system was designed by Accenture. Although NSE was quick to come out with a statement saying they dont blame Accenture, as it was not a software problem but a network one.

So what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but googling around people have always complained about the slow system at NSE, and experts have doubted if it would be able to handle pressure.