?Just weren?t careful enough?: ASX shakeup imposed by Australia?s corporate regulator after daylong outage

The corporate regulator has taken the unprecedented step of imposing conditions on the licence of the Australian Stock Exchange as the market operator moves to a new technology system that uses blockchain technology.

It comes after confidence in the ability of the ASX, which is a key piece of Australia's financial infrastructure, to process an average of about 1.5m share trades a day was shaken by a botched technology upgrade last November that stopped trade for a day.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission's action against the ASX, one of the top 20 exchanges in the world, is likely to be closely watched by overseas regulators that oversee markets that also need regular technology upgrades.

"The Australian economy, economies in general, are very reliant on markets being liquid and being open when they're supposed to be open," the Asic chairman, Joe Longo, told Guardian Australia.

"From the international perspective of the Australian market, people expected it to be open and it wasn't, so for people who were managing superannuation funds, managing people's wealth and assets, it's really a critical part of the Australian economy to have a fully functioning robust stock exchange."

Longo said that the ASX failed to follow its own risk management procedures when upgrading the system at the centre of the November outage, ASX Trade, "so things went wrong".

"They just weren't careful enough," he said.