Nasdaq officials were able to restore trading panic thirty minutes into a 191-minute blackout by providing assurances that the bourse is under control. It took another two and a half hours before trading of USD5.9 trillion-worth of securities resumed. A Nasdaq official said to Reuters, "We had to make sure all the exchanges were connected to us successfully and if the firms on the outside could get in."
Trading of big-chip companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and 3,200 others were ground to a halt at around 00:14:03 PM EDT due to an unexplained technological problem in securities trading.
In a statement released late Thursday, Nasdaq blamed the blackout to a ""connectivity issue between an exchange participant and the SIP," or the Securities Information Processor, which led to not releasing price quotations.
The outage was albeit the biggest in a series of technological glitches that had afflicted US securities market. Nasdaq earlier was sanctioned to pay USD10 million in penalties due to mishandling Facebook's 2012 IPO.
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