Message Storm Knocks NYSE Offline

ninjee writes "The New York Stock Exchange is re-examining its network after it was forced to close four minutes early at 3:56pm on Wednesday (1 June) because of a communications glitch. Trading opened on time (09:30 EDT) the following morning but the outage irked traders and raised questions about the reliability of a network described as 'ultra reliable' following improvements made in the wake the September 11 terrorist attacks. The outage stemmed from a fault in a system designed to distribute market data and operate computer trading systems. NYSE Chief Executive John Thain said that both the main system and its backup were swamped with error messages, Reuters reports. He added that the exchange would carry out remedial work designed to prevent any repetition of the problem."

Details?

[CrackHappy]

I haven't got the time or I would look myself - does anyone have any more informative sources on the specific information about the cause of the problem? And WTF is a "Message Storm"? God - another catchphrase - great!

Re:Great!

[Atzanteol]

I never saw the slashdot editors claim they were 'late breaking' or 'first on the scene'. Where in hell did you people ever get that illusion?

Re:no final print

[krbvroc1]

While its true that minute to minute trading is speculation, there are many legitimate reasons that people dont want outstanding trades overnight. We are still talking trader/speculators, not investors. If something bad had happened overnight it could have been a disaster to the economy.

I'm not a day trader, but some (most?) day traders follow the rule that you close out all positions at the end of the day and don't leave yourself vunerable overnight.

By your logic it would be best to only open the market once a month. But that would make the market much less liquid and that does materially affect the fundamentals of the stock market system. Even if you are a day trader and accept a much higher risk, the risk of the market not working at all is still outside the norm.

I'm finding it tough to find anything to agree with in your post - my gut tells me even the statement of "large fund managers-- don't speculate on minute-to-minute fluctations" is wrong. People with huge risk try to minimize that risk by hedging short term (even minute-minute) flucations in stocks, options, and currency.

Re:Nice copyright violation

[mcguyver]

I never thought the day would come when someone posts a joke [answers.com] and the respone, on /. of all places, references copyright restrictions. How ironic, if not a sad sign of how times have changed.

This happens all the time

[Ececheira]

I work in Technology for a Wall Street firm (you've heard of them). Stuff like this happens all the time -- systems go down and are usually back up pretty quickly, some route to some exchange will bounce for a few min. This time it was worse in that it affected NYSE and not one of the smaller exchanges at the end of the trading day. If you look at any graph showing trading volumes, the last few minutes of trading are always the heaviest.

99.9% of the time, things bounce back very quickly and with the exception of a few internal emails, nobody cares, things go on.

Re:Nice copyright violation

[jesterzog]

I never thought the day would come when someone posts a joke and the respone, on /. of all places, references copyright restrictions. How ironic, if not a sad sign of how times have changed.

I don't see why it's ironic. As uninformed as some slashdot posts are, there are also a lot of users who recognise that copyright makes a lot of sense, and is actually useful. It's the enforcement of copyright that allows the GPL and the GFDL to work. What many people here do complain about is the never-ending extentions of copyright, arguably against the general public interest, and allegedly because corporations have bought off politicians.

This may be a joke, but it was copied verbatim without providing the copyright notice, which is required [wikipedia.org] by the GNU Free Documentation Licence. It's a copyright violation, and to ignore it as irrelevant would be hypocritical and ironic in itself. (Not to mention illegal.)

Re:Details?

[bigberk]

I figure we're not getting the entire story. Remember, the NASDAQ had a "mysterious glitch" within the past few weeks as well (quotes off by multiples). Two of the best run, most important stock exchanges in the world suffering unusual and silly sounding errors?

Re:Oh no!

[fishbowl]

"It's black Tuesday all over again. Everybody sell, sell, sell! The market is about to collapse!"

It's possible that people made money overnight by accidentally holding positions that they intended to close. It's also possible that the error could compound the next day by creating problems at opening. It could conceivably cost a LOT of money to hold a position that you wanted out of when the market closed.

Don't gamble with borrowed money.