The London Stock Exchange is back to normal after a software glitch on Monday halted trading for the longest period in eight years.

"It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn't have foreseen," an exchange representative told Reuters on Tuesday.

The outage began about 45 minutes after trading opened on Monday and lasted more than seven hours--effectively wiping a full day's trading from the books.

A representative told Silicon.com that the exchange, which switched to its digital trading platform TradElect in June 2007, has been running normally since the fix was put in place.

The outage comes in an important month for the exchange. The platform was expected to begin to offer trades in Italian equities this month, made possible through the acquisition of Borse Italia in 2007.

This month was also the deadline for TradElect to reach 10,000 continuous messages per second.