Mizuho’s Internet Trading System Failure Enters Third Day

Mizuho Financial Group Inc.’s securities unit suffered another outage at its stock trading website on Thursday, disrupting services for individual investors a day after telling the press it expected the platform to restart. The Internet trading system, which processes transactions for about 50,000 of Mizuho Securities Co.’s 1.2 million account holders each day, has been offline since early Tuesday morning after the brokerage discovered problems it said were related to an internal network connection. “We don’t know when we can resume the service,” company spokesman Atsushi Maruyama said by phone. At a news briefing in Tokyo on Wednesday night, Executive Managing Director Yuzo Kanamori said the firm aimed to bring it back online this morning. Mizuho has been plagued by system failures since it was formed from a three-way merger in 2002. It suffered a major outage when integrating systems that year and another in 2011 when accounts to take donations for disaster relief after the earthquake and tsunami were overwhelmed by transactions. The securities unit drew regulatory scrutiny when it suffered a costly “fat-finger” trading mistake in 2005. Mizuho has said that the current failure is unrelated to a major systems upgrade that the group is implementing to integrate its corporate, retail and trust banking systems. The breakdown came as stocks listed following initial public offerings managed by Mizuho. That made it more difficult for customers to trade shares of Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co. and IPS Inc. on their debut. “We are very sorry to cause trouble on the very important listing days,” Kanamori said. (Bloomberg)