NYSE, WSJ.com, United Airlines: Rash of technical outages hit all at once


Traders watch news coverage at the New York Stock Exchange after trading was halted due to a technical glitch.
(Justin Lane / EPA)

By CHRISTINE MAI-DUC AND BRIAN BENNETT contact the reporters


First, United had a "network connectivity" issue that grounded all its planes for over an hour. Then, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading. And around the same time, the website of the Wall Street Journal went down.

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The Wednesday outages immediately ignited speculation about a coordinated cyberattack. No evidence so far points to any kind of hacking, but the series of major outages nonetheless underscored the vulnerability of large and vital institutions in the digital era.


United flying again after glitch, but passengers hit with delays

The flurry of problems paralyzed parts of the business world, starting with a computer system outage that wreaked havoc on travelers' schedules with extended delays.

A few hours later, the stock exchange halted trading over an apparent technical issue. Trading in all shares stopped abruptly at 11:32 a.m. ET, and as of 12:45 p.m. ET, trading had not resumed.

A federal official told The Times that there’s no indication that problems experienced by United Airlines or the NYSE are related to a cyber attack and that the events appear to be unrelated.

“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” the exchange tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue.”

In a statement, United Airlines said the ground stop was caused by a “network connectivity issue.”

Separately, the website for the Wall Street Journal also appeared to go dark for a short time.

The Journal’s website was partially restored later, and a message at the top of its homepage advised readers that the site was experiencing “technical difficulties,” and that the full site would “return shortly.”

Calls to representatives of both news outlets were not immediately returned.

This article will be updated.

http://www.latimes.com/business/tech...708-story.html