‘Technical issue’ brings down New York Stock Exchange

The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in all stocks Wednesday morning due to an apparent technical problem.

The NYSE halted trade just after 11:30 a.m. EST, saying in a notice on its website that “additional information will follow as soon as possible.”

Shortly afterward the NYSE Twitter feed said that the shutdown was due to “an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach.”

“We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue,” @NYSE said.

NYSE said in a subsequent notice that it had canceled all open orders.

Traders at the NYSE informed the New York Times that they were told the problem stemmed from a software update rolled out before Wednesday’s business day. A trader told the paper that the NYSE said the new software caused problems shortly after trading began, and the whole system was shut down to fix the problem.

Major stocks listed on the NYSE continued to trade on the Nasdaq and BATS, the third-largest US exchange.

The Nasdaq suffered the last major outage on a major US exchange, going down for three hours in August 2013 due to technical problems.

The outage also came on the same day as United Airlines grounded planes at US airports for an hour due to a computer glitch. The website for the Wall Street Journal newspaper was also suffering intermittent glitches.

At 1615 GMT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 17,562.42, down 214.49 points (1.21 percent).

The broad-based S&P 500 fell 27.56 (1.32%) to 2,053.78, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index lost 73.49 (1.47%) to 4,923.97.