New York Stock Exchange resumes trading after suspension

UPDATE: The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) resumed trading after almost three and a half hours of suspension.

At 3:10 p.m., the system resumed after NYSE President Thomas Farley said it was due to a system configuration problem, but did not elaborate on what exactly went wrong.

All trading in the NYSE were halted on Wednesday due to a technical malfunction.

(2 of 3) We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue.

— NYSE (@NYSE) July 8, 2015

At about 11:32 a.m. Eastern Time, all stocks stopped trading at the world’s largest stock exchange. “We’re working to resolve as quickly as possible,” NYSE spokeswoman Marissa Arnold told Bloomberg Business. “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 re-open.”

There has not yet been an indication that the technical problem was a cyber attack. NYSE said its issue is an internal one. Though bizarre technical issues have also United Airlines. All flights were grounded for two hours this morning due to a “connectivity issue,” though the issue has since been restored.

11:32:57 – trades from NYSE drop sharply, sputter a few minutes, then nothing. Each dot a NYSE trade pic.twitter.com/QmJl8Y2b91

— Eric Scott Hunsader (@nanexllc) July 8, 2015

The issue is not a system-wide failure, as some are trading via alternate platforms. The NYSE’s Arca platform and NYSE AMEX/ARCA options are said to be unaffected by this issue and continue normal operations. Nasdaq has indicated that it is operating normally, and continues to trade NYSE securities.

The Toronto Stock Exchange’s main index has since been down 200 points.

The halt in operations echoes the Nasdaq “flash freeze” incident in 2013, that saw an exchange outage for three hours.