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Days after the National Stock Exchange had to halt trading on its platform for around four hours, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that the incident came with immense cost for the financial markets.

Speaking during a virtual conference on the occassion of Civil Accounts Day, Sitharaman emphasised on the need for upgrading the processes in line with the new technologies.

Noting that glitches and faults turn up even in cases where there is 'fullproof' security, she said: "In the NSE where there was a glitch, a kind of technology driven glitch, nobody could have anticipated it...but that has cost us immensely and lessons are being learnt."

Last Wednesday, NSE had to suspend trading for nearly four hours after a technical glitch affected the links from the telecom service providers. The glitch affected the online risk management system, due to which market fuctioning had to be halted.

In the face of severe criticism over the trading halt, NSE said on Friday that it "sincerely regrets" the incident.

At a time when questions are being raised as to why the disaster recovery site did not come to the rescue during the incident, the NSE said that it took the decision of not migrating to the recovery platform after detailed consultation and evaluation.

Capital market regulator SEBI, which has sought a detailed root cause analysis from the exchange, has also asked the NSE to explain the reason for not migrating to the recovery site.