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.
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NYSE’s breakdown came two years after the Nasdaq Stock Market was forced to halt trading in its shares for three hours because of a broken price feed.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 261.49 points, or 1.47 percent, to 17,515.42.
The Standard and Poor’s 500 index closed down 1.7 percent Wednesday, but it was dropping before the NYSE shutdown.
Anyone left squirming by a New York Stock Exchange ICE, -1.53% trading halt that lasted more than an hour is either a trader or has the wrong portfolio. NYSE said its issue is an internal one. But the NYSE now competes with some 60 trading venues to attract buy and sell orders from brokers. The configuration issue pertained to how the exchange’s systems interact with 1 a different, a supply told ABC News. The NYSE, it turns out, only handles about 14 percent of the daily volume of stocks traded in the United States.
The exchange restarted trading at 3:10 p.m. Eastern.
The outage came as traders had plenty of other things to worry about.
It did not help that a mysterious computer glitch had caused United, one of America’s biggest airlines, to ground all its flights shortly beforehand. The Wall Street Journal also was inaccessible for a brief period.
Conspiracy theories following computer outages at United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange on the same day have sparked accusations that China is involved. Citing an anonymous trader on the floor of the exchange, The New York Times reported that traders were told that the problem is related to updated software released prior to markets opening on Wednesday.
“We are in contact with NYSE and are closely monitoring the situation and trading in NYSE-listed stocks”, SEC Chair Mary Jo White said.
The exchange made the statement in a tweet on its official Twitter account.
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Electronic trading isn’t foolproof, of course, and a squirrel once famously took down the NASDAQ for about an hour and a half. The Nasdaq and other exchanges are unaffected by the outage. It also mentioned that, as the NYSE shutdown exposed, hacking is not the only problem we may be dealing with. It did not specify the exact nature of the technical issue. “There’s no shortage of other places that are open and trading at this point”.
