Just weeks after telling Congress that doing their jobs has become too damned hard, the stock exchanges are providing more evidence.

This time, the problem is the consolidated tape, which provides trade data. Seems it went out for about an hour at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, making it tough to see in anyone had traded in 165 unimportant securities like State Street Corp. stock. And NYSE's snafu follows a consolidated tape screw-up at Nasdaq last week; while NYSE's server error only messed with some of its stocks, Nasdaq's consolidated tape feed went totally blank on Thursday.

The episode was the latest disruption of reporting to the so-called consolidated tape, the record of securities transactions across all U.S. exchanges. Financial firms, news agencies and regulators rely on the consolidated tape to track market activity, though exchanges also sell direct data feeds that provide more detailed information. A similar outage also affected Nasdaq-listed stocks last week.

Starting at 2:10 p.m. EST on Tuesday, the NYSE began “experiencing an issue publishing trade and quote information” in stocks with symbols ranging from SJ to TCZ, it said in a notice to customers.

For these keeping track, in recent months our bourses have had to admit they can't competently run IPOs, deal with faulty data, print water-proof stock certificates and now, reliably provide trade data. But they are available for a bargain.

NYSE Server Failure Interrupts Market Data on 165 Securities [WSJ MarketBeat blog]
Traders Report Technical Issue Involving Nasdaq-Listed Securities [WSJ]