Last week, New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wallstreet Journal suffered massive network outages. The internet, in particular Twitter was awash with claims of a major hack. In the case of United Airlines, the outage lasted for one and a half hours in which, all its flights were grounded. The glitch left thousands of the company’s customers across the World stranded, with the effects spilling over in its 235 destinations within the United States and 138 International destinations. The glitch which the Airline company called a network connectivity issue affected a total of 3,500 flights.
United Airlines has since clarified that a router issue has led to a degrading of network connectivity for its various applications leading to problems with the company’s systems. After investigations, the company has also said hackers were not responsible for the glitch. During the glitch, tickets could not be checked and flights could not be monitored effectively.
The New York Stock Exchange stated that a software update was responsible for the outage. In a statement, the NYSE said the company deployed the initial release of the update to one trading unit, which led to communication issues between customer gateways and trading units with the new software build. The NYSE then attempted to correct the problem, but this led to new complications culminating in the decision to suspend trading at the bourse. During the glitch, all the screens at the Exchange displayed a “No quotation” message. Many worried the glitch was a hack, after the incident affecting United Airlines earlier in the day or software bots called Quants that have been used to trade the market in recent years. The Wallstreet Journal attributed its glitch to high traffic in the site.
Source: Slate
