So far this morning, United’s entire fleet was down due to a computer glitch. Now the NYSE has stopped all trading. They’re also saying the Wall Street Journal’s site is down, as well as Bloomberg, all because of computer glitches.
What’s the deal? Are our IT systems as ragged as our roads and bridges? We’re we hacked? Or are our systems so vulnerable and intermingled that one bug affects too many common systems. It all seems so strange.
I hadn’t heard about the nyse. I’m heading up to my BIL’s wedding and multiple people were supposed to fly in on United today and they’re stranded in their connection cities.
Something just seems strange… But stranger, benign things have happened.
Been following this, as well as the ongoing damage to internet cables in San Francisco http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/30/california-internet-outage/29521335/
And apple had issues last week, that made Siri and other dictation functions not work. Makes us feel too dependent on this stuff!
"…the NYSE issued a new statement saying the shutdown was attributable to an “internal” computer malfunction and was not the result of an outside cyberattack.
…United officials said an “issue with a router” caused the operational disruptions…"
Vulnerable, yes. Believe these explanations? Don’t know.
Do the computer systems have anything to do with the Chinese stock market taking a dive?
It seems coincidental, but I don’t really know much about this stuff.
Then again, just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you!
EK, I doubt our problem is connected to China. China’s stock market has been going down for about a month now, it’s just getting worse now because of the snow ball effect.
Hacked I’m sure but lie to us so people don’t panic. Scary
I’m agreeing with @riverbirch, but have no information source to back that up at this time.
Hard for me to believe they didn’t have back up servers to fail over, especially NYSE.
Yes, oldfort! I can believe United can screw up, but NYSE?!
Even with backup servers or stuff inthe cloud, systems can go down or some fool can authorize the wrong change that can crash a system. Thats why they have disaster recovery plans.
jym626 - backup servers are for DR. 
I imagine NYSE would have hot-hot backup, meaning it would gracefully fail over to their DR servers whenever a production server goes down.
Assuming it all works as its supposed to. My DH has had to deal with his share of disaster response issues when the back up plans fail.
No one wants systems to go down… but stuff happens.
I would be interested to find out what actually happened. At most trading firms, DR is tested regularly, and for most mission critical systems, hot-hot back up is the norm.
I have to wonder if they purposely kept the system down until they were 150% sure that there were no holes in the program that a hacker could have gotten into that could allow them to further sabotage the system or worse, take funds/accounts.
Agree there should be immediate back-up but I don’t know where in the line this problem happened.
And just as I was about to post this, CC went into error.
Maybe because of this http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/1791764-announcement-hardware-upgrade-tonight.html#latest
The probability of two very very unlikely events occurring on the same day is close to zero. I don’t believe in coincidences. They have to assure us it was some kind of purely technical glitch for “security” reasons. BS! This was a big deal for UAL - all flights grounded, but for the stock market as a whole, almost a non-event. The NYSE is nearly irrelevant these days. Most of the volume is already traded on other exchanges.