NYSE Reveals Reason Behind Shutdown
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has revealed the cause of the recent shutdown that shocked investors around the world.
The NYSE posted a statement on its website at around 6 p.m. yesterday explaining what led to a collapse of the NYSE system. According to the statement, “the rollout of a software release” was to blame for NYSE shutdown that left investors everywhere anxious.
“As customers began connecting after 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning,” the NYSE statement read, “there were communication issues between customer gateways and the trading unit with the new release.”
The NYSE says the “customer gateways were not loaded with the proper configuration compatible with the new release.”
According to the NYSE statement, however, that was only the beginning of the problem. The customer gateways were “updated with the correct version of the software” before the NYSE opened its doors at 9:30 a.m.
“The update to the gateways caused additional communication issues between the gateways and trading units, which began to manifest themselves mid-morning,” the NYSE statement continued.
NYSE customers began reporting “unusual system behavior” at around 11 a.m. Trading was suspended about half an hour later and news of the shutdown spread from New York to Tokyo.
NYSE eventually restarted all customer gateways and resolved problems related to unfinished trading orders. Trading on the NYSE began to resume at 3:05 p.m., over three hours after it was suspended.
The NYSE shutdown did not result in a shutdown of global markets, however. As CNBC has reported, “trading essentially went on unabated.” The other major stock markets around the world and other various platforms for securities trading allowed trading to continue unaffected by NYSE shutdown.
Earlier rumors abounded suggesting that the NYSE shutdown might have been part of what was believed to be a larger cyberattack that brought down the Wall Street Journal‘s website temporarily and grounded United Airline flights. (United Airlines later announced that the issue was caused by “a network connectivity issue,” according to CNN.) These system failures even coincided with calls for a protest in front of the NYSE by the hacktivist group known as Anonymous.
Even if the NYSE shutdown and other major system failures were not due to malicious behavior, they do reveal how vulnerable those essential systems actually are.
The Boston Herald pointed that out in an article it published following the NYSE shutdown, describing the incident as “an unintended Wall Street fire drill for the real deal: a massive hack of our financial infrastructure.”
The Los Angeles Times also highlighted the fact that personal data and businesses were not the only things connect to the web, but electricity grids, public transportation, and GPS have also been wired. It also mentioned that, as the NYSE shutdown exposed, hacking is not the only problem we may be dealing with. “Human error, broken cables, buggy code, or other unforeseen issues” may cause severe problems in the near future if not solved soon.
Television comedian Stephen Colbert posted a YouTube video after the NYSE shutdown, mocking the vulnerability of our modern lives due to our complete dependence on technology.
How worried are you about the vulnerability of modern systems after the NYSE ‘system update failure’?
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
