BREAKING: NY Stock Exchange, Wall Street Journal, United Airlines, All Down Because of ‘Computer Glitches’

by Warner Todd Huston | July 8, 2015 1:53 pm

This morning a trio of big name companies went down due, they all say, to “computer glitches.” The New York Stock Exchange, the website for The Wall Street Journal, and the entire aircontrol system for United Airlines all went down this morning with the latter grounding the airline.

Channel you inner conspiracy with this massive failure of three high profile businesses!

Business Insider on the failure of the New York Stock Exchange[1]…

Trading was halted at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday morning.

The latest from the NYSE is that all symbols are not trading and all open orders are now canceled.

“Additional information will follow as soon as possible,” the NYSE’s website says.

The halt started at 11:32 a.m. ET and was triggered by a technical glitch.

“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” NYSE tweeted out about an hour after the halt. “We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue. NYSE-listed securities continue to trade unaffected on other market centers.”

CNBC on United Airlines[2]…

United Continental resumed service Wednesday after grounding its flights worldwide for two hours because of a computer system problem.

The worldwide groundstop had impacted about 3,500 flights, the airline said, apologizing to customers “for any inconvenience.”

“An issue with a router degraded network connectivity for various applications, causing this morning’s operational disruption,” United said. “We fixed the router issue, which is enabling us to restore normal functions.”

Politico on the downing of The Wall Street Journal’s website[3]…

The Wall Street Journal’s homepage experienced an outage on Wednesday amid similar troubles at the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines.

The newspaper’s homepage displayed a 504 outage, though other sections of the newspaper’s website, such as its Markets page, continued to function. The outage came at a curious time, just hours after United Airlines grounded all their flights across the country due to computer problems, and mere minutes after trading was halted on the New York Stock Exchange.

NBC News’ Pete Williams reported that officials do not think the glitches at United and the NYSE are connected, and it’s possible that with the NYSE news, the Wall Street Journal’s homepage is crashing under intense traffic.

This comes as the Chinese markets are crashing in a major correction (it’s lost some 30% of its worth already) and, of course, the mess in Europe and Greece.

Now, all these different systems are claiming that their problems were isolated and government authorities are saying none of these are examples of any cyber warfare attacks.

So, what do you think? Is it cyber warfare? Or all a big coincidence?