The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that trading on Canada's biggest stock market came to a sudden halt Friday afternoon, as technical problems forced major exchanges to shut down early. A triple-bylined item led by Christina Pellegrini says that all equity and derivatives marketplaces operated by TMX Group, including the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, TSX Alpha Exchange and the Montreal Exchange, stopped functioning just before 1:40 p.m. (ET). TMX called off the session before 3 p.m. TMX cited "an internal technical issue" and said it was "working to rectify" the problem. A TMX spokesman declined to provide further details. The company did say that it expects its markets to open again Monday. TSX trading glitches were common in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the technology has become much more reliable in recent years. As a result of the outages, clients were not able to access their trading orders on TMX markets. The company told traders that any "day orders" in the system, which are valid only on the day they are entered, will be purged before the markets open again. One player said that if the TMX went down on a day when indexes were being rebalanced, "That would be a disaster."