(Newswire.net — July 9, 2015) — United Airlines grounded all flights for three hours Wednesday after their terminals lost connectivity. The stop created major air-transportation delays that affected more than 3500 flights. Soon after, the New York stock exchange halted all trades due to an unexplained technical glitch. US officials dismissed the cyber-attack theory, however, didn’t explain what the causes of both events were.
United Airlines blamed their router which regained its functionality after rebooting. However, the process took nearly three hours.
“An issue with a [computer] router degraded network connectivity for various applications, causing this morning’s operational disruption,” United said in a statement. “We fixed the router issue, which is enabling us to restore normal functions.”
The same day, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stopped trading and cancelled all open orders. Giving that traders exchange information in milliseconds, the several hours halt caused extensive damages. The stock trade was reopened around 3:15 pm and closed at the regular time 45 minutes later.
In a statement issued an hour after the halt, the NYSE said it experienced an internal technical problem which is not the result of a security breach by hackers or any external activities. Both, Homeland Security and the FBI, later issued a statement to confirm that the problem was an “internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber-breach.”
Then the Wall Street Journal’s website went down.
Though the Journal was able to re-establish the page by noon, the cause of the problem remained a mystery, Russia Today reported.
Different theories started to roam and social networks became heated with comments. According to one anonymous trader from the NYSE cited by the New York Times, “the problem was due to a software update that was rolled out before the markets opened Wednesday morning.”
While officials ruled out the possibility of a cyber-attack, Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) tweeted that the outages at United, NYSE and WSJ gave the “appearance of an attack.” He refers to it as a reminder for Congress to pass a cyber-security bill he sponsored.
Hactivist group the Anonymous tweeted the hope that Wednesday would be a “bad day for Wall Street,” and one cyber-security company said its systems were showing an increase in attacks on a St. Louis hub, reportedly home to some NYSE servers.