Happy glitch day! That’s what we should call yesterday, July 8, 2015. ?At least three major institutions were affected in one day.
A computer glitch at the New York Stock Exchange made an already bad day at Wall St. even worse. Glitches halted trading for four hours, interrupting trading for over half the work day. Meanwhile, United Airlines, one of the largest airline carriers, suffered a computer shutdown. It was so bad that it grounded every United airplane at every airport in the USA for three hours! A United Airline spokesperson said the glitch was a router issue. If that wasn’t enough, The Wall Street Journal, the most trusted financial news medium in the US, was also hit by a glitch. This one was blamed on the people. It was explained so many people went to the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the other two glitches that WSJ’s website couldn’t handle so much traffic at once. By workday’s end, all three institutions were running again. No link was found between the NYSE and United Airline glitch. Though these shutdowns concerned authority figures from the White House to the FBI to Homeland Security, all insisted hacking wasn’t involved.
I must disagree with the authorities’ assessment. Three major institutions went down in one day at the same time! That’s no coincidence. Think of all the chaos this caused. Think of the chaos and work stoppage at the stock exchange and the billions that didn’t get traded. This was on the same day Asian stocks took a nose dive. Think about the chaos at airports nationwide. Business meetings were disrupted. Vacations were disrupted. I can only imagine the tempers flaring and tears shedding at the airports. And even after the glitch was fixed, they have to get thousands of displaced passengers on flights. They’re too many coincidences. And why ?was Wall St. Journal the only one hit? I’m sure many media were flooded when these glitches came down. I’m convinced these businesses were deliberately hacked (okay, there’s no hard evidence to prove that…yet). But who could and would pull something of this magnitude?