Suspicious computer glitches have hit three USA business giants affecting travel, stock exchange and the biggest financial news website Wall Street journal.
The USA homeland security department issued a statement made available to media assuring people that this did not appear to be work of hackers but just a coincidence that the software that controls the New York stock exchange went down on the same day United Airlines suffered the same fate with its checking in Software.
United Airlines issued a statement saying it suffered from “a network connectivity issue this morning,” and apologizing to customers for any inconvenience. It said that 4,900 flights were impacted by the problem worldwide.
CNN was reporting that, the problems from Wednesday morning’s glitch will likely to ripple throughout the day and even into Thursday, said James Record, a professor of aviation at Dowling College. He said the schedules are so tight that it will take a long time for United to restore normal operations after so many flights are disrupted, even if it is only for a bit more than an hour.
Record said that even flights that were able to land as planned would be delayed because there was no gate available to unload passengers. That would cause many passengers to miss connections.
“There will be a large group of people who will not get to fly today as planned,” he said.
Trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor was halted shortly after 11:30 am local time Wednesday, with all screens displaying a “No quotation” message, according to eyewitnesses.
“It’s chaos. No one seems to know the root of the cause which seems to me is making everything worse, “a source on the floor of the stock exchange said, according to Bloomberg reporter Leslie Picker.
The NYSE is reportedly rushing to fix the “technical problem,” but there has been no official explanation why all floor trading has been halted. The exchange said it was canceling all open orders as well.
“We’ve had some technical malfunctions. Some may be related to connectivity with other exchanges. I believe we’re going to have a temporary pause certainly in a variety of stocks perhaps floor wide,” Art Cashin, director of floor operations at the NYSE, told CNBC.
While the Wall street Journal website was getting the dreaded 504 Gateway Timeout error message. And displaying a blank page. They appear to be up and running now.