This afternoon, Nasdaq came to a screeching halt due to a technical glitch in the computer system. The outage lasted around three hours. According to the Washington Post, the outage took place at 11:45 am and systems were not up and running again until a little after 3:00 pm.

When the problem arose, people all over the world who are involved in the stock market were upset. Many of them shared the view that a more stable stock exchange should be in place by this day and age. It is still not clear as to why the glitch took place. There were not a lot of comments made by the company about the issue. They did say that anyone who wanted to cancel an order would be able to do so but Nasdaq would not be canceling any open orders.

The Washington Post also said that “Equity trader Sal Arnuk, co-founder of Themis Trading, said Nasdaq ran into trouble with the security information processor, or SIP, which manages the quotes for each stock in real time for all 13 exchanges.
“When Nasdaq was not interacting appropriately with the SIP, there are dangers in no one knowing what the best price in the market is, so they halted trading,” he said.”

A short message by Nasdaq went out around noon today, letting people know that trading would be paused due to its system of disseminating prices, according to Fox News.

Thousands of different stocks are traded through Nasdaq every day. The most popular ones traded today have been Apple and Microsoft and have been extremely popular in the past few months due to both comapnies producing new, reliable products that bring in high profit, and having a large fan base.

The stock market closed today at the normal time of 4:00 pm with a 1 percent rise, or going up 38 points.

[Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]