Trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was suspended on Thursday because of a problem in the system for relaying market information. The Tokyo Stock Exchange said trading would not resume for the rest of the day. It was unclear when it would be resolved and the system would be operating again. Details on the Tokyo trading problems were not immediately available. Japan’s nationally circulated Asahi newspaper, without citing sources, said the cause was likely a mechanical failure. The Nikkei fell 1.5% on Wednesday, its biggest decline in two months, as an acrimonious US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden increased concerns about an indecisive outcome from the election in November. “The timing is really just bad,” Takashi Hiroki, chief strategist at Monex in Tokyo, said about the trading halt, adding many market participants were hoping to buy back their stocks or increase their holdings following an overnight rise on Wall Street. “As expected, US stocks were unaffected by the US presidential election, but gained instead on stimulus hopes. And that could have prompted a surge in stocks’ buybacks in early Japanese market. But the market was robbed of that chance.” The Tokyo Stock Exchange is the world’s third largest bourse after the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, with market capitalisation of nearly $6 trillion. The TSE has been prone to system troubles in the past and was notorious for sluggish trading, but problems have been relatively rare since it expanded its capability with the introduction of a new system in 2010. The TSE had suspended trading in October 2018 due to problems with its trading system. The exchange promised to investigate, conduct malfunction tests and change the system to ensure that a flood of orders would not cause the entire system to stop working. Several top executives of the exchange were penalised. The problem comes weeks after the New Zealand stock exchange was hit by a series of cyber attacks.