Stocks continued to trade elsewhere, and without any dramatic moves up or down.
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Eric Scott Hunsader, a Wall Street expert who works at data firm Nanex, said that clues to the blackout could be seen early Wednesday morning.
Problems exhibited themselves before the market opened that morning and escalated over the next few hours before trading was shut down at the NYSE and its affiliated NYSE MKT, once known as the American Stock Exchange.
“We’re now experiencing a technical issue that we’re working to resolve as quickly as possible”, a NYSE spokesperson said in a statement to the media.
At midday, the Dow Jones industrial average was down about 200 points, or 1.1%. There was no indication the outages were related.
President Barack Obama had been briefed on the NYSE suspension, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
Officials at the exchange say there is no evidence of a cyber-attack, although the FBI said it is “monitoring the situation”. The roll-out was in preparation for an “business test” this Saturday, and it all started when “the initial release was deployed on one particular trading unit”, the exchange stated.
However, the Department of Homeland Security said the disruption was not a cyberattack. Later came more exchanges, like ones run by BATS Global Markets, and “dark pools”, or trading platforms that allow customers to buy and sell in large quantities without alerting the broader market.
For years the hacker collective “Anonymous” has threatened to take down the New York Stock Exchange.
Wall Street cheered a huge rebound in China, which is scrambling to put a bottom under its crashing stock market.
The outage came as major indexes were heading lower. The Dow opened more than 240 points higher. Mining company Freeport-McMoRan jumped 5 percent. Trading exchanges have long struggled with technical troubles. NYSE believes the glitch was caused by a problem with a software update it rolled out on Tuesday evening, the exchange said in a new statement released on Thursday.
It just shifted from the New York Stock Exchange to other exchanges and trading venues. Citing, Sal Arnuk, a principal at Themis Trading, CNBC reported that all electronic trades must be nullified manually.
Two months later, a highly anticipated IPO of Facebook on the Nasdaq exchange was marred by a series of technical problems, rattling investors unsure if their orders went through.
What caused the outage?
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A technical issue has triggered a system-wide halt.
