NYSE Trading Resumes After 3-Hour Outage

By John McCrank

The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in all securities on its platform Wednesday for what it called an internal technical issue, and canceled all open orders as investors shifted activity to other venues.

The exchange, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., said the halt, which occurred shortly after 11:30 a.m. Eastern time, wasn't the result of a cyberattack. Other exchanges were trading normally.

UPDATE: Trading on the New York Stock Exchange resumed late Wednesday afternoon, more than three hours after a technical outage halted activity on its own venues.

Trading resumed around 3:10 p.m. Eastern time.

Investors had been able to continue trading in NYSE-listed stocks throughout the outage as orders were routed to other exchanges.

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"We will be providing further updates as soon as we can, and are doing our utmost to produce a swift resolution, communicate thoroughly and transparently, and ensure a timely and orderly market reopen," an exchange spokeswoman said.

There are 11 U.S. stock exchanges, and NYSE-listed stocks continued to trade on other venues, such as those run by Nasdaq OMX Group and BATS Global Markets.

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

Technology Concerns

The issues at NYSE came on the same day that computer problems led United Airlines (UAL) to ground all its flights for about two hours and the home page of the Wall Street Journal's website temporarily went down.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said there were no signs that the problems at NYSE and United Airlines stemmed from "malicious activity," CNN reported.

Nearly all U.S. trading is done electronically, and the NYSE outage again raised questions about the technology at exchanges after major glitches in recent years.

A technical problem at NYSE's Arca exchange in March caused some of the most popular exchange-traded funds to be temporarily unavailable for trading. And in August 2013, trading of all Nasdaq-listed stocks was frozen for three hours, leading U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White to call for a meeting of Wall Street executives to insure "continuous and orderly" functioning of the markets.

The SEC said Wednesday that it was closely monitoring the situation at NYSE. The White House said President Barack Obama had been briefed on the matter.

The New York Stock Exchange accounted for about 13.4 percent of all equities volume last month and 12.5 percent Tuesday according to BATS Global Markets data.

-Rodrigo Campos and Caroline Valetkevitch contributed reporting.