Computer glitches knock out the NYSE, United Airlines and the Wa

Separately, the website for The Wall Street Journal also appeared to go dark for a short time.

This ideal storm of technical glitches on Wednesday and the cascading effects on American life sent many scurrying to social media in search of answers – and some levity – causing Twitter activity to spike.

Just last month, the Polish airline LOT was forced to ground 10 flights after hackers infiltrated their IT systems. Many traders took it all in stride.

President Obama was briefed about the episodes, but Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said there was no evidence that the crashes were caused by cybercriminals or terrorists. The airline said the problem was due to a “network connectivity issue”.

Trading did continue on the NYSE’s competitor exchanges, and it’s not the first time a stock market has suffered from technical problems. In the end, trading resumed late Wednesday afternoon, nearly four hours after the shutdown began, less than an hour before the 4 pm closing bell.

“The internet is so interconnected that a small error in one place can rapidly bring many other things to a screeching halt”, added Stella. Also, tech companies that – behind the scenes – analyze vast amounts of Web traffic say they haven’t spotted a coordinated attack.

Given the complexity of the computer systems we rely on daily, these sorts of problems are inevitable, said Costis Toregas, Associate Director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University.

As the world becomes more connected, such events expose serious risks for countries, companies and individuals who depend so heavily on fragile technology – often a mash-up of neglected old-fashioned processes and cutting-edge systems. Matt Gerber, CEO of Digital Fortress, a cloud services and data centre operator based in Seattle, told CRN that for those failures to have occurred, the systems must have had shortcomings in built-in redundancy, fault tolerance and instantaneous failover capabilities, and they likely were not properly tested. However, WSJ-other than its now infamous posting during its problems, “Ooops, 504! something did not respond fast enough, that’s all we know” -has been mum as to the details.

“I think it is distinctly possible”, Aman said.

There are many tools and strategies you can use to keep your company and employee information secure. The level of complexity can be staggering, and this means an error made by a developer half-way around the world somewhere in the supply chain of a service can impact the operations of major businesses like United.

“Therefore, the issue isn’t really our dependency on technology, but rather, our dependency on those who maintain and configure said technology”, said Stella.

Without contingency plans, Toregas says, we are left high and dry, like the hundreds of passengers stranded at Chicago O’Hare global Airport after the glitch.