Tuesday February 8, 2:51 am Eastern Time Hong Kong stock exchange hit by technical problem

HONG KONG, Feb 8 (Reuters) - The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong said on Tuesday that it was hit by technical problems in the afternoon session which disrupted trading of stocks in Hong Kong.

``We are experiencing problems from a power failure,'' said a spokeswoman of the exchange. The exchange was investigating, she added.

``All the machines are down and I can't remember them being down before,'' said Jason Ho, director of sales at BNP Prime Peregrine Securities.

Trading was disrupted for about 20 minutes from 3:06 p.m. local time (0706 GMT) but was partially back on line at 3:26 p.m.

``Only the terminals on the trading floor are working now. The second and third terminals in the (brokers') offices are still down,'' said Michael Ng, deputy managing director at Sassoon Securities.

Brokers said the trading system broke down after a brief power outage and they added that a number of orders could not be completed.

The full extent of the disruption was not immediately known, they said.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/000208/cc.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 08, 2000