The outage came shortly after United Airlines grounded planes at USA airports for an hour due for what it also called a computer problem, sparking concerns of a coordinated cyber attack on major USA institutions.
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“The update to the gateways caused additional communication issues between the gateways and trading units, which began to manifest themselves mid-morning”, the NYSE statement continued.
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. The FAA described the problem with United as an “automation issue” in an alert. However, NYSE and regulators say the outage was caused by an internal technical problem, not hackers.
Investors had been selling before the halt on worries over steep drops in China stocks and the possibility that Greece won’t be able to strike a deal with its creditors. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 33.20, or 0.2 percent, to 17,548.62. The Finance Ministry watch “the situation in the stock market”.
NYSE eventually restarted all customer gateways and resolved problems related to unfinished trading orders.
“From an investors’ perspective, if you hadn’t heard about the outage, you probably wouldn’t have noticed”, Angel said. However, US Homeland Security said the issues appeared unrelated and were not the result of “nefarious” activity.
Now, stocks can be traded at some 60 exchanges and trading venues. Moreover, with the exception of closing and opening time, no exchange has the exclusive rights to any stock or exchange-traded fund.
It’s not clear how long the trading halt, now two hours old, will continue. It went from having more than 80 percent of the share of trades in its stocks to around 25 percent today. NYSE accounted for about 13.4 per cent of USA stocks last month.
Trading exchanges have been struggled with technical trouble in recent years like that which halted trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. The Dow opened more than 240 points higher before giving back some of the gains. Nobody owns more of these exchanges than BATS Trading, which owns four exchanges. The glitch has been the latest in a series since the 2010 flash crash, when the technicalities behind how exchanges operated were beginning to be questioned.
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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 agency has said all the exchange have to have policies and procedures in place to make sure their systems don’t fail”. It did not specify the exact nature of the technical issue.
