The currency matching system of news and information provider Reuters Group Plc suffered a temporary outage on Monday, forcing some traders to switch to alternative venues or trade over the phone.

Reuters shut down the servers for its Dealing 3000 Matching platform at 2205 GMT for emergency maintenance and expected to resolve the problem at 0230 GMT.

The outage hobbled trading in currencies primarily traded over the Reuters platform, which include the British pound, and the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian dollars.

People do seem to be having some problems, said a trader at a North American bank in Tokyo. The market is a bit slow this morning for a variety of reasons, including this and the fact that the yen made some strange moves this morning.

Dealers said they had switched over to alternative platforms such as EBS, a rival system owned by broker ICAP, or to trading over the phone. Activity in euro/dollar and dollar/yen, the two most widely traded currency pairs, was not affected, traders said.

A matching system allows anonymous trading of currencies between buyers and sellers, mainly currency dealers in the interbank market.