According to CNN, all other exchanges, including the Nasdaq, remained in operation during the outage.
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The upgrade, which was released before the market opened, was meant to improve the timestamps on stock quote and trade data.
And around the same time as the NYSE trading halt, the website of the Wall Street Journal went down. They would hand off their orders to a broker, who would turn to a “specialist” on the floor of the stately NYSE building at 11 Wall Street charged with matching buyers and sellers.
US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the issues reported by United and the NYSE were apparently not related to “nefarious” activity.
Materials stocks were among the early gainers as the prices of copper, energy and other commodities reversed a recent slide and turned higher.
At 11:09 a.m., the NYSE issued a warning it was investigating the technical problems.
But the second-ranked exchange threw a barb at its rival on Wednesday.
Stocks continued to trade elsewhere, and without any dramatic moves up or down. Chinese stocks rose sharply overnight after the government’s latest efforts to halt a plunge. The New York Stock Exchange is one of the most important stock exchanges for securities worldwide.
The competition is fierce, and the NYSE is suffering. The NYSE also says the stoppage was due to an internal glitch and not a coordinated cyberattack.
Haven’t similar troubles hit the market before?
The shutdown was by far the longest ever trading halt attributed to computer problems.
In the last 20 minutes of trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 244 points, or 1.4 percent, at 17,532. It was founded by a computer programmer.
Shares of Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE’s parent, fell 2.2 percent.
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 to trade went through. The software in the customer systems was updated prior to the market open at 9:30 a.m. EDT, but that update caused additional issues, the NYSE said in a statement.
While the NYSE outage Wednesday dented confidence, investors are a lot more focused on China.
“The shutdowns are not very frequent given the gazillion of dollars that trade every day”.
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“And while most of you can easily afford to sit back and watch, and not play during a period of mayhem, some industry players will not know their trading positions”, Themis said.
