What You Should Read
On Wednesday a few things happened. A network issue grounded all United Airlines flights. The Wall Street Journal's website was down for a bit. And, most alarmingly, trading on the New York Stock Exchange was halted for three hours. So: What to think? Here are three stories to help you become a more informed — and hopefully empowered! — citizen.
Panic
Why The Great Glitch Of July 8th Should Scare You
The big problem we face isn't coordinated cyber-terrorism, it's that software sucks. Software sucks for many reasons, all of which go deep, are entangled, and expensive to fix. (Or, everything is broken, eventually). This is a major headache, and a real worry as software eats more and more of the world.
DON'T PANIC
Market Fragmentation Will Save You!
This is not a story of people finding that they were unable to trade on the NYSE, freaking out and eventually switching to their backup systems. This is a story of computers constantly trading stocks on 11 different exchanges and then at 11:32 those computers switching to trading stocks on 10 different exchanges, barely noticing that one exchange went dark. Those computers are not sweating it. "For the most part the system is muddling along, relatively normally," says a guy, and presumably if you asked a computer it would be even more chill.
THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE
A History Of Stock Exchange Failures
Stray squirrels, security breaches and, more commonly, technical glitches have caused exchanges around the world to halt.
That's one stock market catastrophe out of the way. But what about China? They too have halted trading in an effort to stop an impending crash. Should we panic about that?1 Let Fusion's Felix Salmon walk you though this one.
