Cargo Business Techwire

Friday, July 10, 2015

Concurrent downing of Wall Street, United and WSJ.com rattles nerves

It looked like the beginning of digital Pearl Harbor. Early Wednesday, the New York Stock Exchange suddenly halted all trading, while United Airlines grounded all flights, and The Wall Street Journal website returned a 504 error indicating there was something seriously wrong with the news organization's servers.

Within a couple of hours, operations at both United and WSJ.com were back to normal. Airline officials reportedly cited a network connectivity issue resulting from a faulty router and said they were working to get flights back on schedule.

Officials at the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the NYSE issued statements saying the outages were not part of some sort of cyber attack. Shortly thereafter, at a little after 3pm New York time, the stock exchange finally reopened, nearly four hours after all trades had been suddenly halted. News organizations said the outage was the result of a faulty software update that was installed before trading began Wednesday morning.

For more of the Ars Technica story: arstechnica.com