Nasdaq suffered a hardware breakdown on Thursday which caused its flagship US equities exchange to fail to properly rout trades with some investment firms.

美国纳斯达克(Nasdaq)交易所周四遭遇一起硬件故障，导致一些投资公司的交易未得到有效处理。

The company said it had resolved an issue with “stuck orders”, or those buy or sell orders that fail to make their way through the exchange’s infrastructure due to a technical problem.

纳斯达克称，技术故障使得一些买入或卖出订单没能通过交易所设备得到执行，成为“停滞订单”。它表示目前问题已解决。

A person familiar with the matter, which affected the exchange from 14:01:06 to 14:03:24, blamed the hardware issue for the failure. The outage impacted a “small subset of orders”, Nasdaq said in statement.

这次故障发生在14点1分6秒到14点3分24秒之间。一位知情人士称，是交易所硬件出了问题。纳斯达克在一份声明中表示，该故障只影响了“一小部分订单”。

After identifying the problem, the exchange said new orders were “not impacted and trading has been continuous”.

纳斯达克表示，在确认问题后，新的订单“没有受到影响，交易已继续进行”。

Stuck orders occur from time to time. In this instance, a person familiar with the situation said the problem involved roughly 5 per cent of the gateways where traders connect to Nasdaq’s data centre in Carteret, New Jersey, to match and process US orders.

“停滞订单”现象时有发生。一位知情人士表示，此次故障大约影响到纳斯达克卡特莱特(Carteret)数据中心的5%的网关。这个数据中心位于新泽西州，负责匹配和处理来自美国的订单。

Typically the exchange maintains a brokerage account that it uses to help orders get through the system in the event of problems. It is unclear if that was employed in this case.

通常，交易所会设立一个经纪户头，用来在系统出现问题时帮助处理订单。目前还不清楚这次事故中是否启用了这一机制。

The failure is the latest in a string of technological issues for Nasdaq, which suffered an unprecedented three-hour halt in August last year that saw trading suspended in some of the most well known and closely held US-listed companies.

这次故障是纳斯达克出现的一系列技术问题中的最新一起。去年8月，纳斯达克曾史无前例地遭遇持续3小时的停机，曾导致部分最知名、持股最为集中的美国上市公司暂停交易。