Nyse Euronext has blamed human error for a 40 minute outage in its European cash markets on Thursday, which appears to be "unrelated to any system of software components".
Operator error led to a shutdown of certain processes on trading units that match equities, bonds and ETFs, leading to a market outage during the afternoon.
During this time new orders were automatically rejected and the status of the order book unchanged. The exchange operator says it does not anticipate any trades being cancelled.
The problem was resolved by the end of trading, with all units available again at that time.