Technical Glitch Forces NYSE to Halt Trading for Three Hours

The outing has unnerved investors who are already rattled by the meltdown in Chinese stocks and the Greek debt crisis

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York. (Photo: AP)

A technical glitch forced the New York Stock Exchange to suspend trading for more than three hours on Wednesday in the biggest outage to strike a US financial market in nearly two years. This has unnerved investors already rattled by the meltdown in Chinese stocks and the Greek debt crisis.

The exchange, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc, said the halt, which occurred shortly after 11:30 am (local time) and lasted until 3:10 pm, was not the result of a cyberattack.

Other exchanges were trading normally.

Reactions to the Halt

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York on Wednesday. (Photo: AP)

It’s not a good day, and I don’t feel good for our customers who are having to deal with the fallout.
– Thomas Farley, NYSE President to CNBC

If you don’t have all the orders on that marketplace on the close, the pricing on the close would be definitely not accurate.
– Peter Costa, Empire Executions Inc President

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

The US market was down more than 1% on Wednesday, as investors continue to focus on turmoil in China and Greece.

(With inputs from Reuters)