ASX hit by outage after RBA’s recent criticism of its governance and practices; is the Australian stock market staring at a crash?

Synopsis Australia's stock exchange, ASX, experienced an outage on Monday, December 1, 2025, impacting the publication of corporate announcements. While some announcements have been released, the issue, which began before 9 AM AEDT, is not fully resolved. This disruption follows recent criticism of ASX's governance and risk management, raising concerns about market infrastructure resilience. ASX outage: ASX, operator of Australia's stock exchange, experienced an outage on Monday (December 1, 2025) affecting the publication of corporate announcements, according to its official website. According to ABC Australia, some company announcements have now been published, but Australia's stock exchange has yet to fully resolve an issue that first occurred before 9 AM AEDT. The outage comes on the heels of the RBA's recent criticism of ASX's governance, culture and risk-management practices, issued after a December 2024 settlement-system malfunction raised concerns about the bourse operator's ability to maintain secure and resilient market infrastructure. "ASX is investigating an issue impacting the publication of company announcements," the website said. "Individual securities will be halted where price-sensitive announcements are received," ASX said in an emailed response to Reuters. “ASX Trade remains fully operational, and all company announcements post 11:22 AEDT have been published. ASX is working with Listed Companies to publish impacted announcements submitted before 11:22 AEDT,” the website stated. According to ABC Australia, ASX Ltd shares have lost more than 2 per cent, while the benchmark ASX 200 index is off 0.3 per cent. Will the stock market crash? Live Events The trading on ASX did not stop itself, but the vacuum caused by the outage was filled by uncertainty due to missing information. Investor confidence goes for a toss after they are left wondering which announcements were delayed or undisclosed. A stock market crash is usually triggered by more than one factor. According to Swikblog, a single outage does not cause a crash. The real fear is mostly driven by the market sentiment. If investors believe the system has weaknesses, selling can accelerate faster than facts. (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)