The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Nasdaq stock exchange has halted all trading as of 12:15 pm EDT today, August 22, 2013 due to technical issues.
Is this simply and internal technical glitch with hardware or software? Or is this the latest in the waves of attacks from Chinese hackers like when they attack infrastructure, Iranian hackers attacking banks, or Eastern European hackers when they steal hundreds of millions of credit cards? Is this a glimpse into the future of cyberwar or just another, simpler explanation of a system failure?
I doubt the system failure explanation on the part of Nasdaq. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ultra-high performance computing systems with redundancies at every level of the systems. It is extremely unlikely that a system failure occurred without an outside influence.
Update 8/22/13 12:10 Pacific Time – Trading is set to resume right now. Securities and Exchange Commission spokesman John Nester said: “We are monitoring the situation and are in close contact with the exchanges.”