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."

Comments

Nice copyright violation

[Anonymous Coward]

...of a wikipedia text. (You didn't follow the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)

pain in the ass

[rcamera]

as a trading engine developer/support guy for a financial firm in ny, i can't stress enough what a pain in the ass this was. the day after the nyse crash, it took hours upon hours of verifying (by hand) trades that the nyse says we were filled on that we never say (because all nyse trading lines were down).

this type of 'message flood' occurs from time to time, but not on the nyse in a while. it's generally the ecms trading otc stocks that have rouge programs blast orders in an infinite loop. when this happens to an ecm, they slow down but generally don't lose the ability to trade. the nyse, who toutes the importance of their rapists^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspecialists because they add 'stability' to the system, was dead in the water. this crash goes to show how useless the specialists really are - without the technology working, they can do nothing. if this is the case, why not just replace them altogether with electronic trade matching?

interestingly enough, the nyse announced mere months ago that they are 'merging' with archipelago - a large ecm. perhaps this merger will be the beginning of the end of the specialists.