Glitch shuts down New York Stock Exchange for four hours
The New York Stock Exchange unexpectedly shut down trading in all of its listed stocks late Wednesday morning. The shutdown lasted four hours before trading resumed.
NYSE shuts down
The exchange made clear on Twitter that it was not an attack: "The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach."
A trader on the floor told the New York Times that after the suspension began, traders were told that the problem was related to updated software that was rolled out before markets opened on Wednesday.
According to the trader, the exchange said that the new software caused problems soon after trading began on Wednesday and the exchange decided to shut down trading all together to fix the problem.
In the hours before the outage, the exchange announced that it was working on an issue with “gateways” that was making it impossible to receive information and cancel orders for some trades.
After the shutdown began, the exchange said on Twitter: “We chose to suspend trading on N.Y.S.E. to avoid problems arising from our technical issue” — though it did not specify the problem.
The New York Stock Exchange, which is now owned by Intercontinental Exchange, has had, like other stock exchanges, technical difficulties in the past, but the scale of the problem on Wednesday has little precedent.
Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange — the world’s largest stock exchange based on market capitalization — continued trading on other exchanges, like Nasdaq, said the NYT.