LeapRate Exclusive… Continuing our exclusive coverage of a series of (seemingly unconnected) outages and hacks hitting the Forex trading world of late, LeapRate has learned that leading Australian retail forex broker AxiTrader experienced an outage lasting several hours on Tuesday October 27. AxiTrader clients were apparently unable to log into their accounts during the latter part of the day or contact the company via web and Internet-related contact means. However we believe that clients were still able to affect deposits and withdrawals.
The outage was caused by Microsoft hosting going down in the region. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, used by AxiTrader and known as typically extremely reliable, reported a ‘Partial Service Interruption’ lasting nearly five hours, from 10:51 to 15:44 UTC (late evening Sydney time), affecting a subset of customers in Southeast Asia. The problems experienced by Azure customers included storage, database, and server hosting.
Microsoft’s initial investigation suggests that the outage was caused by what was actually a planned deployment for a network configuration change. Microsoft engineers have now rolled back the deployment and confirmed that Azure services have been restored in the region.
We expect AxiTrader to be making a formal statement shortly on exactly what happened.
As we noted above, the problems experienced by AxiTrader are the latest in a string of network-related occurrences hitting the retail forex world lately – all seemingly unconnected. Unlike the AxiTrader outage, however, the other situations were based on what seems like more malicious activity. Specifically, we recently provided exclusive coverage of:
- the hack attack on UK-based FCA-regulated MT4 broker ActivTrades which occurred late last week and which saw some amount of client information compromised,
- the DDoS attack on MT4 bridge and hosting services provider oneZero Financial Systems, which for over a period of over a week also brought down the trading systems of a number of retail forex brokers worldwide, including some based in Australia, and
- a hack attack on FXCM Inc (NYSE:FXCM), which saw FXCM client information compromised and even some wire transfers initiated.
Stay tuned to LeapRate as we continue to provide exclusive coverage of this and other developing Forex industry stories.