IT meltdowns and numerous system crashes at MF Global characterised the broker-dealer's final moments before its colossal collapse last October.
As the company searched for cash, its cutting edge IT systems received a deluge of processing requests.
The revelations have been made in a report by MF Global trustee James Giddens, who is handling the company's liquidation.
In the report, filed with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, Giddens concludes that the company had a shortfall in commodities customer segregated funds beginning on 26 October last year, and that the shortfall continued to grow in size until the bankruptcy filing on five days later.
In MF Global's final week of operation, it attempted to process an unprecedented quantity of transactions. It struggled to process a billion dollars' worth of securities sales while handling credit and seeking cash.
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"The company's computer systems and employees had difficulty keeping up with the unprecedented volumes of transactions," Giddens wrote in his report.
Large numbers of transactions were recorded erroneously on MF Global's IT systems, or missed being recorded at all, he stated.
"So called 'fail' transactions - where either the buyer or seller fails to deliver the cash or security, respectively - were five times the normal volume during the firm's final week."
In its investigation, the James Giddens team imaged over 800 computer drives, and has stored over 100 terabytes of data. It also interviewed over 50 witnesses, and went through thousands of boxes of hard copy documents.
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