IT WAS a scene reminiscent of a countrywide blackout. In April 2001, Canada's electronic disclosure repository, SEDAR, decided to reengineer the backend on the system's public website and in so doing plunged hundreds of thousands of links and bookmarks into a void of 404 error pages.

The problem for many Canadian issuers was that they provided links from their IR websites to their regulatory filings on the SEDAR site. When the SEDAR site, which receives upwards of 150 million hits per month, changed all its URLs, none of the links worked.

What's more, most of the links from IR websites remained broken for months -- and many are still broken at the time of writing this in July 2001 -- because SEDAR failed to properly notify filing issuers and the many other sites that provide links to the database's search results pages.

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