The exchange says that as customers began connecting after 7 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “there were communication issues between customer gateways and the trading unit with the new release”. “Human error, broken cables, buggy code, or other unforeseen issues” may cause severe problems in the near future if not solved soon. A NYSE spokeswoman would not provide further details. Investors in big-name stocks used to only be able to trade through the NYSE. Orders were cancelled, trading software was restarted and backup units were brought online, the exchange said.
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Amid speculation about a cyber attack, the White House also swung into action and issued a statement saying it was monitoring the situation and there was “no indication that there are malicious actors involved”. In May 2010, the Dow plunged hundreds of points in minutes in an incident that later became known as the “flash crash”. This is a story of computers constantly trading stocks on 11 different exchanges and then at 11:32 those computers switching to trading stocks on 10 different exchanges, barely noticing that one exchange went dark.
“What’s extremely interesting is that there was practically no change in stocks due to the glitch”, Volokhine said. It is now owned by Intercontinental Exchange, an Atlanta-based company.
The NYSE outage was hardly the first glitch to impact the USA stock market. “Consistent with our rules and in coordination with our management team, I made the decision to suspend trading because, given the anomalous behavior of the system, I was not comfortable that our marketplace was appropriate for your listed securities”.
He says the disruption didn’t cause any problems for the global markets. “Things are so spread out”.
Wall Street officials insist it wasn’t a hack that shut down the NYSE for a few hours Wednesday. “It’s just unnerving”.
Caldwell, the Toronto investor, said the outages have to be put in perspective. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, a victim of the turmoil in mainland Chinese markets, also lost 6 percent.
A shutdown in trading at one the world’s most famous exchanges raised the tension in financial markets Wednesday. That compares with a drop of 1.1 percent for Standard and Poor’s 500 index. It is still up 70 percent over the past year.
Greece is in the midst of a debt crisis that could cause it to default on the European Central Bank.
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But the point is, the exchange was back up and running by market close and official closing prices were recorded. The Nasdaq composite rose 12.64, or 0.3 percent, to 4,922.40. “But to make a 100 percent certain that when we did so, it’d be in a robust way”.
