Computer glitches adversely affect day's economy

UNITED STATES - A bizarre day of computer glitches, started with the grounding of the world's largest airline which has nine hubs in the United States, and a little later in the morning, the sudden shutting down of the New York Stock Exchange for unknown technical reasons, halting trading for more than three hours. All of which had a negative impact to the day's economy.

The NYSE didn't say what the problem was, but described it as an internal issue, and not a breach of its computer systems. Likewise, the airline and FAA officials both confirmed that the airline’s 'network connectivity issue' was not due to hacking or a cyber-attack. Both systems were restored relatively soon, with the FAA lifting the ‘ground stop’ order within a couple of hours, and the NYSE re-opened the market three and a half hours after its shutdown.

Stocks had been lower this morning due to investors reaction to the large sell-off in Asian markets overnight as a result of the uncertainty over the future of Greece. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 177 points to 17,600, when at 11:32 a.m. Eastern Time, trading in all securities on the NYSE stopped. Stock losses accelerated with the Dow's loss briefly exceeding 200 points. The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down 1.6% and the Nasdaq composite index was off 1.7%.

The overseas Asian markets that sparked the NYSE selloff overnight experienced large drops. The Hong Kong's Hang Seng index plunged as much as 8% before closing down 5.8%; China's Shanghai Composite sunk 5.9%; and Japan's Nikkei 225 index lost 3.1% to close at 19,737.64. Chinese stocks are now down more than 30% since early June.

Officials maintain that a technical issue triggered a system-wide halt. All open orders were canceled. The company tweeted that it's "an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach."

And if all that wasn’t exciting enough, coincidentally, the website for the Wall Street Journal was affected by an outage also in the morning. The WSJ.com home page experienced an outage for less than an hour beginning at approximately 11:45 a.m. ET, approximately the same time the New York Stock Exchange shut down, but no explanation has been provided, and cause was unclear.

A kneejerk reaction? Sunspots? Firewall protection to chain of negative events? Or...indeed, cyber hacking? No updates have been provided, but Conroe Today will update the story if any new information is provided.

#Grounded #HackAttack