It's a strange morning when stocks and planes are both shut down due to two separate computer glitches. First it was United Airlines at 8am ET, who was forced to ground all of its departing planes in the U.S. for nearly two hours, affecting 4,900 flights worldwide. Of course this caused huge delays for passengers, which could last for days. Just a couple of hours later, The New York Stock Exchange had to shut down for the day after a technical glitch "froze computers on the market's fabled trading floor." According to The Washington Times:
One of the world’s biggest stock exchanges had seen shares trending down throughout the morning because of economic crises in Greece and China, but all trading halted at 11:32 a.m. as data on trades and prices apparently stopped coming into the traders’ computer screens. Nearly an hour later, the market was still down…
As the shutdown pass the hour mark, the NYSE issued a new statement saying the shutdown was attributable to an “internal” computer malfunction and was not the result of an outside cyberattack.
I know it's most likely just a coincidence, but it's an interesting one.
