Glitch halts trading on New York Stock Exchange

The New York Stock Exchange is one of ten stock exchanges around the country. Trading resumed just after 3 p.m. The exchange says there is more information to come.

Chinese stocks are now down more than 30% since early June.

NEW YORK The New York Stock Exchange was forced to suspend trading for several hours on Wednesday in the biggest outage to hit a US financial market in almost two years, unnerving investors already rattled by the meltdown in Chinese stocks and the Greek debt crisis.

The stoppage was blamed on an internal glitch NYSE, which US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson addressed Wednesday afternoon, along with glitches today at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal’s website. They also said there was no indication of a cyberattack. And stock trading resumed on the NYSE late in the afternoon.

“System glitches are the new norm”, said Sayena Mostowfi, head of US equities research at TABB Group.

The broad-based S&P 500 fell 32.44 (1.56 percent) to 2,048.90, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 85.22 (1.71 percent) to 4,912.24.

UPDATE (WKOW) — The New York Stock Exchange may re-open around 2:45 p.m. ET according to ABC News. But the NYSE now competes with some 60 trading venues to attract buy and sell orders from brokers.

“The root cause was determined to be a configuration issue”, an NYSE spokesman said Wednesday evening.

The stock exchange in China, the world’s second-largest economy, crashed Wednesday after a massive selloff.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day down 1.47 per cent, at 17,515.42. Regulators said the dive was triggered by a computerized selling program.

There are 11 other stock exchanges available, says an official at Themis Trading.

“Outages could hurt traders and investors if they have orders sitting on the order book of an exchange that has a problem”. Trading was halted shortly thereafter. Nasdaq later agreed to pay a $10 million penalty to settle federal civil charges after regulators said its systems and decisions disrupted the IPO.

“The shutdowns are not very frequent given the gazillion of dollars that trade every day”. “You have so many competing exchanges”.

It’s a far cry from 2000, when NYSE dominated trading of the companies brings to the public market, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba and General Electric.