Wall Street employee accidentally causes stock market crash
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...F57RVAJF54NCE/
Wall Street employee accidentally causes stock market crash
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The mistake of one lax employee has sent shockwaves through the financial world and wiped billions of dollars off the charts for some of the globe’s largest companies.
If you thought you were having a bad day in the office, spare a thought for this Wall Street worker who may have single-handedly brought down the US stock market.
A simple human error reportedly triggered wild swings and volatility on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) when trading opened in the morning.
More than 250 companies suffered from wild swings in just a couple of minutes, with stocks changing by 25 per cent of their normal market value.
Big brand names were caught up in the catastrophe including McDonald’s, Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley.
Tens of billions of dollars were wiped off in market value.
As confusion set in, the NYSE came clean, admitting that the “root cause” of the screw-up was a “manual error”.
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According to Bloomberg, a staff member at the NYSE backup data centre reportedly failed to properly shut down Cermak’s disaster-recovery system, prompting the crisis.
The crux of the issue lies in the fact that by leaving the backup system running, the exchange’s computers thought that trading had not ceased from the day before.