NYSE comes back to life
The New York Stock Exchange floor restarted trading around 3:10 p.m. The technical glitch caused a halt of almost 4 hours. NYSE President Thomas Farley said that the issue had been resolved. However, it was unclear on what had caused it. The situation is being monitored by the White House. Officials denied any connections to a cyber attack.
On 8 July, the New York Trade Exchange (NYSE) halted its trading. There was news that open orders at NYSE had been cancelled and none of the symbols were trading. The halt began at 11.32 a.m. and was triggered by "technical issues", though many fear that the cause could be related to a cyber breach.
The 223-year-old stock exchange has been interrupted before. The last one was in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy battered the Eastern Seaboard. Interestingly, it also shut down after WWII and the 9/11 attacks.
United Airlines experienced a "network connectivity" problem that led to its grounding all planes for an hour. This outage was a disaster for the travellers and multitude schedules had to be extended. United Airlines issued a statement blaming "network connectivity issue" for the outage. The Wall Street Journal website too went down around the same time and was restored an hour later.
The New York Stock Exchange suffered what is being called its biggest outage in almost 10 years. However, the Nasdaq issued a statement confirming that it was "operating normally and we are able to trade type A securities (NYSE-listed companies)." According to Ted Weisberg of Seaport Securities, the halt was "an inconvenience, it's annoying, but it has not interrupted our business."
International hacking group Anonymous sent out a tweet the night before the halt saying: "Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street.... we can only hope."
After the NYSE halt that lasted a few hours, the stocks were trading at much lower than on 8 July 2015. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 261 points or 1.47% to 17515. The Nasdaq Composite shot down 87 points or 1.75% to 4909 while S&P 500 tumbled 34 points or 1.66% to 2046. Shares of NYSE's parent company (Intercontinental Exchange) fell by 2.4%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average invented in 1986 by its namesake Charles Dow is a "price-weighted average of 30 significant stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq."
