Econintersect: Today the NASDAQ stock exchange shut down for more than three hours. According to Reuters, the exchange attributed the stoppage to a “data feed issue” involving failure to properly distribute stock price quotes. This was just the latest performance problem for NASDAQ. One of the more “infamous” episodes was the failure by NASDAQ to properly handle order flow during the Facebook IPO in May 2012.
The NASDAQ episodes were presumably local system operations problems. However such local situations can have wider ranging effects. Global “interconnectedness” was evidenced earlier this week in another episode. Amazon’s retail home page was down for 49 minutes on Monday 19 August, according to Compuware, although Amazon itself has remained silent on the subject according to Information Week. According to the latest reports the outage affected only North American access to Amazon. However, Information Week reports that services elsewhere in the world had latency changes (slower or faster response times) that overlapped the North American outage.
In 2011 another Amazon outage showed evidence of the company’s switching control systems having exacerbated a smaller problem when systems started interfering with each other. (Information Week)
In late September into early October 2011 Bank of America (BoA) experienced a week of outages (interruptions) and slowdowns which the company attributed to a combination of “heavy traffic along with a rollout of a new computer system” (The New York Times).
BoA again had operational difficulties nation wide with electronic banking operations earlier this year. (Los Angeles Times)
Several banks were targets of Iranian hackers in the fall of 2012, according to the Washington Post.
In November 2010 Computer World reported that BoA, Chase and Wells Fargo experienced online banking disruptions due to “computer issues” which Wells Fargo tellers identified as “part of a national outage“.
The virtual world is not virtually infallible.
Sources:
- Nasdaq market paralyzed by three-hour shutdown (Reuters, 22 August 2013)
- Facebook Trading Irregularity Mars IPO (John Lounsbury, GEI News, 18 May 2012)
- What Really Happened with Facebook’s IPO (John Lounsbury, Investing Daily, 21 May 2012)
- Amazon Outage Leaves Latency Mystery (Charles Babcock, Information Week, 22 August 2013)
- Post Mortem: When Amazon’s Cloud Turned On Itself (Charles Babcock, Information Week, 29 April 2011)
- Heavy Traffic and New Computer System Disrupted Web Site, Bank of America Says (Nelson D. Schwartz, The New York Times, 05 October 2011)
- Outages hit Bank of America electronic and phone banking (E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times, 01 February 2013)
- Iran blamed for cyberattacks on U.S. banks and companies (Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post, 21 September 2013)
- Computer glitch takes out ATMs, online banking on a massive scale? (Darlene Storm, Computer World, 08 November 2010)
