Hong Kong Companies Registry website falls victim to glitch as ‘hardware problem’ brings down electronic registration service
- The e-Registry, a 24-hour portal that accepts applications for registration of businesses, was down from 7am to around 12.30pm on Thursday
- It comes a week after HKEX had to suspend derivatives trading because of a software issue
Hong Kong’s Companies Registry became the second major victim of a technical glitch in the space of a week as a “hardware problem” forced it to suspend its online services for over five hours on Thursday.
The e-Registry, a 24-hour portal that accepts applications for registration of local and non-local companies, was down from 7am to around 12.30pm.
It came just a week after a software problem brought down the derivatives trading platform of Hong Kong stock exchange, which was quickly followed by a hack cyberattack on the bourse operator’s website.
Today’s problem was “not related to any hacking or program bug”, the Companies Registry said in a written reply to queries from the Post. “The hardware problem has been rectified.”
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s difficulties on September 5 arose from “software issues”, leading to a suspension of derivatives trading, an incident unrelated to hacking. The derivatives transactions were halted from 2pm until the end of the day.