New York Stock Exchange suspends trade after glitch

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The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) suspended trading in all securities on its platform for more than three hours Wednesday over what it called an internal technical issue. The Exchange canceled all open orders as investors shifted activity to other venues.

NYSE, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc, said the halt, was not the result of a cyber attack. Other exchanges were trading normally.

“We will be providing further updates as soon as we can, and are doing our utmost to produce a swift resolution, communicate thoroughly and transparently, and ensure a timely and orderly market reopen,” an exchange spokeswoman said.

There are 11 United States stock exchanges, and NYSE-listed stocks continued to trade on other venues, such as those run by Nasdaq OMX Group and BATS Global Markets.

Trading however resumed late yesterday afternoon, more than three hours after the technical outage that halted activity.

“This is one of the rare cases where the fragmented markets we live in actually serve a purpose,” said Dave Nadig, director of exchange-traded funds at FactSet Research Systems. “If this happened (elsewhere), you would just be sitting staring at a blank screen.”

Read also: NSE LIVE! Equities lose N138b as macro uncertainties persist

The issues at NYSE came on the same day that computer problems led United Airlines to ground all its flights for about two hours and the home page of the Wall Street Journal’s website temporarily went down.

The US Department of Homeland Security said there were no signs that the problems at NYSE and United Airlines stemmed from “malicious activity,” CNN reported.

Nearly all US trading is done electronically, and the NYSE outage again raised questions about the technology at exchanges after major glitches in recent years.

A technical problem at NYSE’s Arca exchange in March caused some of the most popular exchange-traded funds to be temporarily unavailable for trading. And in August 2013, trading of all Nasdaq-listed stocks was frozen for three hours, leading US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White to call for a meeting of Wall Street executives to insure “continuous and orderly” functioning of the markets.

United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Wednesday that it was closely monitoring the situation at NYSE. The White House said President Barack Obama had been briefed on the matter.

NYSE accounted for about 13.4 per cent of all equities volume last month and 12.5 per cent Tuesday according to BATS Global Markets data.

Thousands of United Airlines passengers suffered delays because of the latest fault. A computer error forced United Airlines to ground its flights in the US for the second time in recent weeks.

The firm blamed a “network connectivity issue” for the latest fault. The two-hour long issue caused delays to more than 90 of its aircrafts, according to the FlightAware website.

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