Wednesday turned out to be a perfect storm of tech glitches, which crippled United Airlines earlier this morning and the New York Stock Exchange. The Wall Street Journal Website was also briefly not working today.
First, there was the issue at United, which temporarily stopped all main United flights this morning. The airline tweeted, “We experienced a network connectivity issue. We are working to resolve and apologize for any inconvenience.”
About a half hour later, United posted, “We're recovering from a network connectivity issue & restoring flight ops. We’ll have a waiver on http://united.com to change flights.”
According to The Verge, the problem was described as “automation issues.” The FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center finally lifted the ground stop by 9:45 a.m. Eastern.
This is actually the second time in less than two months that United flights have been grounded because of a software glitch. Early last month, there was another hiccup that lasted much longer, keeping flights on the ground for two hours.
The next big network glitch came on Wall Street. At 12:09 p.m., the NYSE tweeted that it was “experiencing a technical issue that we’re working to resolve as quickly as possible.” Trading came to a sudden halt at the time and the NYSE insisted that it was not a cyber attack.
“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” a statement from the NYSE on Twitter read. “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.”
Another glitch hit the Wall Street Journal site, although it appears to be up and running now. Slate notes that there was a message on the site that read. “WSJ.com is having technical difficulties. The full site will return shortly.” It was posted just moments after the NYSE outage started.