MUMBAI The Reserve Bank of India has sought an explanation from financial technology and data provider LSEG about an outage in the spot foreign exchange market on Friday, a source aware of the development said.

Earlier in the day, major stock indexes in Britain and Italy provided by FTSE Russell, also owned by LSEG, were briefly halted due to an outage, but resumed trading after the issue was resolved.

"There was technical issue between 09:10 and 09:50 GMT. The issue has now been resolved and all indices are calculating and publishing to all vendors," an LSEG spokesperson said.

LSEG did not have an immediate comment when asked to confirm the India outage and the RBI request for an explanation.

Six traders told Reuters there was a system outage for about 10 minutes on the spot dollar/rupee trading platform and they were unable to transact.

"The central bank has sought a root cause analysis of the issue. Whether standard operating procedures were followed and a business continuity plan was put in place when the system went down," a source aware of the development told Reuters.

"They are keen to find out if the issue was due to a system failure or some human error," the source added on condition of anonymity as the matter was sensitive.

LSEG, is among the few entities other than banks that is authorised by the RBI to operate an electronic trading platform, or ETP, for transactions in the spot foreign exchange market. It is part of the London Stock Exchange Group.

(Reporting by Swati Bhat, Jaspreet Kalra and Nimesh Vora; Additional reporting in London by Alun John; Editing by Jon Boyle)