Nasdaq ‘technical glitch’ halts trading for three hours
The Nasdaq Stock Market suffered a nearly three hour outage Monday, stopping all pre-trading on the exchange before the morning opening bell.
Image by Jeenah Moon | Reuters
A Nasdaq Stock Market technical glitch that halted all pre-trading orders on the exchange before the opening bell on Monday morning has been fixed.
Nasdaq said it has resolved the "connectivity" issue, which began in the early morning hours just before 5 a.m. EST.
The market blamed the outage on problems with its matching engine and announced it had determined the root cause of the issue about 45 minutes later.
By 7:14 a.m. EST, Nasdaq reported the issue fixed in a statement on its website.
“The Nasdaq Stock Market has resolved its earlier matching engine issues and all systems are operating normally. Nasdaq will provide a full postmortem when available, “ it said.
The matching engine is the electronic system used to facilitate trades by matching buy and sell orders placed by market players considered the backbone of the global trading system.
Nasdaq also acknowledged the outage had affected Nasdaq’s "RASH FIX" financial information messaging protocol system, which delivers real-time activity information taking place on the exchange, Nasdaq states.
“Any unacknowledged orders on Rash FIX have been canceled back to customers,” Nasdaq said in several updated statements.
Separately, a Nasdaq spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg News that no trades were printed on the Nasdaq Global Market between about 4:09 a.m. and 7:03 a.m. in New York.
These types of system glitches can upend markets, hit traders' confidence and trigger investigations from regulators.
Investors began to notice the lack of movement on the exchange almost immediately.
“It seems that the stock market is down? No stock prices have moved for at least 35 minutes. Checked multiple brokers, said X user @INV3STORSANON.
“The 3:00am Nasdaq outage set the stage for today’s melt up,” said another X user.
Besides the thousands of stocks listed on Nasdaq, the exchange hosts numerous US tech giants, including Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia.
Nasdaq did not provide any other details about the issue or the root cause. Cybernews has reached out to Nasdaq for further clarification and is awaiting a response.
Nasdaq experienced another technical glitch in December when a system error impacted stock orders for over 50 clients at the exchange.
The impact on trading volume Monday morning “represented just 0.8% of all exchange trades,” reported Reuters.