Technical Glitches Down NYSE, Others

A slew of technical glitches caught the financial world off guard midday on Wednesday.

The New York Stock Exchange mysteriously halted trading shortly before noon, after reports of technical glitches earlier in the morning.

"We had some technical notices earlier this morning saying that some groups of people weren't able to access [the exchange]," Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, told Benzinga. "I'm guessing [the shutdown] is an escalation of that."

Hillcrest Strategies founder Marlon Weems told Benzinga that the development probably wasn't a huge setback to traders, since NYSE-listed issues were still tradeable on other exchanges. However, he admitted that such a massive technical problem "is still something you don't want to see."

Related Link: Major Financial Sites, NYSE, Web's Most Popular Destinations Went Down Today

Both Weems and Hunsader called the glitch the most severe they'd seen since NASDAQ's 2013 blackout.

Nevertheless, according to Hunsader, such issues are far from rare. He said that NYSE experiences some sort of technical headache "about once every quarter."

The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and other Dow Jones outlets all saw its websites go down around the same time as NYSE suspended activity. WSJ's website came back online soon after it crashed, but in an altered format.

Reddit, Craigslist and Glassdoor also went down. Even more curiously, Zero Hedge, whose servers are located in Switzerland, and the European Parliament's websites blacked out temporarily as well.

Early Wednesday morning, United Airlines UAL was forced to ground about 5,000 flights worldwide after suffering "a computer problem."

There is no indication yet that the incidents are related.

As Weems put it, "technology is beautiful when it works for you; but when it doesn't, it's a nightmare."