Technical issue halts trading on NYSE

NEW YORK – It was already a tough day in the market when the unexpected hit.

The New York Stock Exchange halted trading late Wednesday morning because of technical trouble.

The outage came as traders had plenty of other things to worry about. Concerns about China’s plunging stock market and a logjam in talks between Greece and its creditors weighed on the mood. Major indexes already were falling before the shutdown, which occurred shortly after 11:30 a.m. Eastern time. NYSE resumed trading at 3:10 p.m.

The exchange, in a statement late Wednesday, attributed the malfunction to a “configuration issue” and not as the result of hackers. A NYSE spokeswoman would not provide further details.

The broader stock market stayed open as orders to buy and sell kept flowing to the Nasdaq and other exchanges around the country.

Tom Caldwell, who runs an investment firm with stakes in several exchanges, said there are about 60 exchanges and trading venues that can take orders when one goes down, so investors shouldn’t get rattled.

“It’s disruptive, but not wildly disruptive,” said Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the NYSE situation, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Officials told the president there were no malicious actors involved.

By the end of the day, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 34.66 points, or 1.7 percent, to close at 2,046.68.

The Dow Jones industrial average dipped 261.49 points, or 1.5 percent, to 17,515.42, and the Nasdaq slid 87.70 points, or 1.8 percent, to 4,909.76.

Portfolio manager Mark Spellman of Alpine Funds said an outage similar to Wednesday’s would have caused panic a few decades ago, when the NYSE dominated the market. But firms making trades were able to use a variety of other exchanges while the NYSE was out of commission. He said the disruption didn’t cause any problems for the global markets.

But Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors, said it was unsettling that computer problems also forced United Airlines to temporarily ground its flights across the country and the Wall Street Journal’s website went down, all on the same day.

“These are visible icons of American industry,” he said. “It’s just unnerving.”