United Airlines grounded flights around the globe.
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A short time later, “technical difficulties” at the Journal’s website, WSJ.com, sent readers to a temporary site while the paper worked to fix the problem.
According to The Washington Post, all of the airline’s flights had to be grounded due to a supposed error on one reservation made at 8am on Wednesday morning. All it takes is a single error – even misplaced text – to grind it to a halt.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama was briefed on the NYSE halt and United computer glitch but there was no indication of any terrorist activity or that a cyber attack caused the outage.
That tweet had gone up on Tuesday, and suggested that whoever runs that account knew something fishy would happen on Wall Street itself.
United said on Twitter it experienced a “network connectivity issue”, with reports later adding detail that a faulty router was to blame.
Trading was abruptly halted at 11:32 a.m.in the middle of a busy trading day, stunning the market and sending frazzled traders to alternative markets where stocks listed on the NYSE were still trading. In the end, trading resumed late Wednesday afternoon, nearly four hours after the shutdown began, less than an hour before the 4 pm closing bell.
“Additional information will follow as soon as possible”, the NYSE’s website says.
As the world becomes more connected, such events expose serious risks for countries, companies and individuals who depend so heavily on fragile technology – often a mash-up of neglected old-fashioned processes and cutting-edge systems.
Cyber attacks have been ruled out as the cause of major IT glitches suffered by United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wednesday. Its crashing coincided with the other two major corporate technical problems, which did not go unnoticed on Wall Street.
Clarke mentioned that the task of examining exactly what happened in every case – and any potential connection in between them – could take days or weeks for digital forensic authorities, ought to the USA government or the corporations themselves launch a full-scale investigation. The Department of Homeland Security denied that any of the issues were related, but some cyber security experts were not convinced, and neither were some of the people affected. “Perhaps”, he said. “I stick with the conspiracy theory of nation-state retaliation for the market crash – or alien invasion”.
Still, the incidents are a jolting reminder about our deepening dependence on technology and the need for security not only against intruders, but also glitches.
“Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start”, she said.
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A United spokeswoman said that the glitch was caused by an internal technology issue and not an outside threat or hacker.
