Outage Communication Recommended Practices

Outage and market interruption communications refer to the process of informing stakeholders and market participants about disruptions to venue services, systems, or operations. Effective communications are essential to maintaining transparency, managing expectations, and mitigating the impact of outages, interruptions and halts on financial markets.

Venues (and other firms) typically communicate outages in a variety ways, such as publishing updates on their websites, via multicast or sending emails to members and market participants. This lack of standardisation can result in delays, inconsistent levels of detail, and in some cases insufficient communication in terms of content and frequency. This is particularly prevalent when communication updates are handled through manual processes.

The objective of this document is to provide recommended practices for standardising communication in the event of outages. This includes providing a list of FIX fields to be shared in the event of disruptions.