NYSE Outage: "glitch" or cyber-attack?

The NYSE says it was a glitch, but it happened " hours after United Airlines temporarily grounded its flights due to what the company said was a “network connectivity issue… And at about the same time as the NYSE freeze, the Web site of the Wall Street Journal went down.“http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/nyse-trading-has-been-halted/2015/07/08/46b51974-2588-11e5-b72c-2b7d516e1e0e_story.html”] link.

From the USA today: “Let’s hope it’s not a hack,” says Kaltbaum. “Then the worry is, if they (hackers) can do this to the NYSE, what about our banking system or our electric grid. Our stock exchanges are one of the most protected systems out there, and if (hackers) can shut it down, then we have something to really worry about.”

IOW: If they (the hackers) can get into the NYSE, they can probably get into your bank account, too.

As a professional trader who has seen exchanges/trading systems go down many, many times, my vote is simple software glitch. Had one of the exchanges or ECNs that isn’t a household name gone down, it wouldn’t have even made the news. The whole thing was a non-event. Trading was barely disrupted at all.

NYSE being down for 4 hours and no one knowing what was going on is hardly ‘barely disrupted at all’.
HACK and FEYE are both doing pretty well today as a result.

I stand by my statement. Trading never stopped in any symbol. If you wanted to buy or sell any stock during the day, you could. The NYSE is one of many, many venues through which trades can be made. Every other venue was functioning 100% normally.

Sure, HACK and FEYE are having a good day. CYBR is another one. That doesn’t mean anything, IMO.

As I pointed out in the GD thread, everything runs on software, and all software is broken. It’s not remarkable that the NYSE was down for a few hours, it’s remarkable that everything isn’t down all the time.

Weinberg’s Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Anyone you ever wrote a check to, or paid with account/routing information can get into your bank account anytime they want.