The more than three-and-a-half hour New York stock exchange shutdown on Wednesday was caused by engineers loading the wrong software on to the system, the NYSE admitted on Thursday. The Nasdaq still operated normally and several other exchanges were also available for investors to execute trades while the NYSE worked through its problems.
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By the end of the day, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 34.66 points, or 1.7 percent, to close at 2,046.68.
The NYSE reopened trading at 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday, plenty of time before the 4 p.m. closing. Wednesday’s trading halt generated global headlines and briefly raised concerns about a cyber attack.
Asking all exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories to implement necessary changes within six months, Sebi said these Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs) need to have a robust cyber security framework to provide essential facilities and perform systemically critical functions of trading, clearing and settlement in securities market. But the NYSE now competes with some 60 trading venues to attract buy and sell orders from brokers. The halt was due to technical difficulties that began shortly after 11.30am.
Other exchanges, including the NASDAQ, are still operating.
It was already a tough day in the market when the unexpected hit. Angel sat on the board of exchange company Direct Edge before it was acquired by a larger rival previous year. However, NYSE and regulators say the outage was caused by a botched software update, not hackers. “Based on what I’ve seen in the past, these type of things are usually some sort of issues related to an upgrade, maybe to handle the excessive traffic that’s constantly coming in with high-speed trading”.
In fact there are really about a dozen “exchanges” that can handle the stock trading volume, but don’t think of these as exchanges with traders in their coats and ID badges handling the business face-to-face on some sort of trading floor.
The New York Stock Exchange has suspended trading in all stocks because of a “technical issue”.
It came hours after a glitch grounded hundreds of United Airlines flights across the country, but the NYSE and White House moved quickly to dispel fears that the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
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The New York Stock Exchange stopped trading in the late morning Wednesday because of a technical issue, though shares continued to trade on other exchanges.
