NEW YORK // The New York Stock Exchange shut down its main market for more than three hours on Wednesday because of a computer malfunction, forcing traders to steer orders elsewhere, in the biggest disruption to an American equity venue in almost two years.
“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” NYSE said on Twitter during the shutdown. “We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems rising from our technical issue.”
Stocks stopped trading on the exchange’s platform at about 11.32am in New York but continued to change hands on other venues such as the Nasdaq Stock Market and Bats Global Markets. Trading resumed at 3.10pm local time.
Earlier on Wednesday, United Airlines flights were grounded after a router issue degraded connectivity in the airline’s networks. As United was bringing its systems back online, trading on the NYSE came to a halt due to a technical problem and the Wall Street Journal’s website also experienced errors.
“It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor,” said US homeland security secretary Jeh Johnson during a speech at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point, except that their system is in fact up again.”
* Agencies
