The New York Stock Exchange shut down trading at 11:32 a.m. on Wednesday, blaming an internal technical glitch.
“We've had some technical malfunctions. Some may be related to connectivity with other exchanges. I believe we're going to have a temporary pause certainly in a variety of stocks perhaps floor wide,” said Art Cashin, NYSE’s director of floor operations,
according to CNBC.
Other major stock exchanges have continued trading normally.
The Department of Homeland Security calmed some concerns when it
told CNN that there is “no sign of malicious activity” at the NYSE or with United Airlines’ computer system, which suffered an outage earlier on Wednesday. United Airlines was back up and running after just a few hours, and other glitches occurred on The Wall Street Journal’s homepage, which malfunctioned at around the same time the NYSE shut down.
“Given the global paradigm of what's going on in the EU, Greece, China, this is the last thing that the U.S. equity markets need,” said former NYSE employee Peter Kenny, now the chief market strategist at the financial technology firm, Clear Pool Group.
Forbes magazine noted that the NYSE shutdown, along with United Airlines’ system malfunctions and subsequent flight delays, provides “yet another example of how dependent Americans — and most others around the world — are on data management and communications systems. It’s also an example of how vulnerable our lives to disruptions in those systems, whether those disruptions are the result of a technological error or breakdown or some sort of malicious act.”
Disgruntled stock traders and other consumers vented their frustration and posted reactions on Twitter.