Following a volatile morning in which US stocks were down over 1%, trading on the New York Stock Exchange has been halted. The cause appears to be a technical glitch in the system which has thus far been classified as a “gateway connectivity issue”, the origin of which is still unknown despite the fact that nearly 30 minutes have passed since trading has paused. Open orders will be cancelled until the issue is resolved. NASDAQ trading is running as usual.
In an interesting twist, the NYSE technical glitch is coming only a few short hours after a technical glitch at United Airlines grounded all US-based flights for a few hours this morning. Likewise, the Wall Street Journal’s website has also crashed, the cause of which is also currently unknown (speculation is that it could be traders looking for information, but more likely it’s an unrelated technical glitch as well). Though there seems to be no connection between the crashes, analysts are already speculating on how these incidents will affect the technology sector as a whole.
In August 2013 the NASDAQ suffered a similar shutdown which lasted for 3 hours. The timing of the current NYSE shut down, however, is poorly-timed with other technical crashes, and doomsday analysts are questioning whether there is a larger message to be seen. Others are speculating that the huge market news coming out of China and Greece may have caused volatility that caused the crash. However, the latest reports coming out of the NYSE indicate that there was a small technical glitch at 10:37am EST which was reported to traders as resolved. Exactly one hour later trading was suspended, indicating that the shutdown is not a cyberattack but a purely technical problem. Nevertheless, the true source is not immediately known and may take hours or even days to surface.