The Australian sharemarket remained on pause at 1.30pm AEDT as the market operator searches for the cause of today's gremlins. The index was frozen three hours ago at 10.24am AEDT following an unnamed data issue the ASX first said it had identified before it withdrew the update and continued its investigation. The latest system update at 1.30pm said the process was ongoing and an update would arrive by 2pm. The local benchmark had risen as much as 1.3 per cent to near nine-month highs before trading was paused. A number of blue-chip stocks - including the banks, miners, and biotech CSL - were surging. It is the third time the ASX has halted trading in the past five years. The most recent outage was on 5 June, 2018, when the futures platform dropped out at 4.55pm. But the whole market was last halted in September 2016, when a hardware failure stopped the market opening at 10am. It eventually opened at 11.30am, but was forced to close early at 2.05pm. It resumed trading as normal the next day.