TMX Group Chief Executive Officer Lou Eccleston says the exchange operator’s “unprecedented” outage on Friday had nothing to do with the company’s cost-cutting efforts.

In an interview on BNN Bloomberg, Eccleston said the blame for the outage was entirely due to hiccups with the underlying technology, not how much the company spent on it.

“This is not a function of money, this did not happen because of a cost-cut. We have gone with state of the art technology that is standardized throughout the world in very large companies,” he said. “This was not about cost-cutting, we have redundancy in our primary system. The manufacturer says this is an unprecented event they’ve never seen happen either.”

Operations at the exchange ground to a halt shortly after 1:30 p.m. ET on Friday, and the TMX Group ultimately decided not to restart operations in time for the closing bells. Eccleston said that decision was made in a bid to ensure the exchange didn’t clear trades that may have been executed based on faulty data.

“We made a decision about not coming back up because it was in the best interest of all of our clients, retail and institutional,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is come back and make a trade on data that wasn’t accurate, 100 per cent. We still think that was a smart move to make and protected all investors.”

TMX Group has been steadily paring its costs over the last two years, cutting 10 per cent of its staff in the fall of 2016 and divesting a string of non-core assets, including the sale of NGX and Shorcan Energy to Intercontinental Exchange last year. Those efforts were borne out by the 10 per cent decline in TMX Group’s operating expenses in its most recent quarter.

Investors weren’t entirely out of luck if they wanted to execute trades because alternative exchanges were able to process buy and sell orders on TSX-listed equities. However, TMX-owned exchanges are the dominant force in Canadian capital markets, accouting for about 61 per cent of the trades in this country.

While some may have been shaken by the more than two-hour outage, Eccleston pointed to the exchange’s multi-year stretch without a trading disruption and pledged TMX Group would work hard to rebuild investor trust.

“Our track record is very strong,” he said, “but now we have to get back and rebuild that long track record again.”