By Thyagaraju Adinarayan
LONDON (Reuters) - Exchange operator Euronext (PA:ENX) said it halted trading in all its products on Monday due to a technical issue, affecting equities trading in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris.
The widespread outage has hit trading in cash equities, derivative products and commodity futures across Europe.
"No one can trade at the moment, everything is on standstill," said Mikael Jacoby, head of continental European equity sales at Oddo Securities in Paris.
The outage follows a severe one on the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier this month, which brought stock markets in Japan to a complete standstill, in the worst ever outage for the world’s third largest equity market.
"We are working to resolve this issue and we will provide an update as soon as possible regarding the expected pre-opening time and resumption of trading," said Euronext, which operates France's blue-chip index CAC 40.
A spokesperson for the company declined to provide further details on the reason or the expected duration of the outage.
The CAC 40 (FCHI) was up 0.8% at 4,976.15 points before the halt. Germany's DAX (GDAXI) and London's FTSE 100 (FTSE) have all drifted lower in the last 30 minutes.