Technical issues forces halt in trading at New York Stock Exchan

The technical glitch followed a hiccup earlier on Wednesday, when the NYSE issued an alert about “a reported issue with a gateway connection”, which affected trading of certain stocks.

Officials at the exchange say there is no evidence of a cyber-attack, although the FBI said it is “monitoring the situation”.

What happened: In a brief announcement, the exchange said it was experiencing a “internal technical issue”.

Investors had been able to continue trading in NYSE-listed stocks throughout the outage as orders were routed to other exchanges.

GLITCH: United Airlines temporarily grounded all its flights in the USA because of a problem with its computer system.

NBC reporter Carl Quintanilla tweeted a photo from inside the exchange, showing one of the trading screens. CNBC quoted the exchange as citing “technical issues” for the problem.

This story was first published on CNN.com, “New York Stock Exchange suspends trading”. At this point, the Dow Jones industrial average is down 230 points to 17,546.

However, U.S. Homeland Security said the issues appeared unrelated and were not the result of “nefarious” activity.

Josh Earnest, White House press secretary, said: “There is no indication that there are malicious actors involved”.

“It is the most significant outage since Nasdaq’s blackout [in 2013]”, says Eric Scott Hunsader, a market structure expert and CEO of data company Nanex.

Despite the big brouhaha over the NYSE’s troubles, to investors, the trading halt on Wall Street may not mean much of anything.

Greece is in the midst of a debt crisis that could cause it to default on the European Central Bank. News correspondent, Bob Pisani, read it from the trading floor.

Stocks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Macys, Travelers, Hess Corp, and others all trade on the NYSE. Trading on the Nasdaq, however, continued.