NYSE trading resumes after being suspended due to technical glitch

By: Tanya Agrawal, Reuters

The New York Stock Exchange resumed trading after an outage that lasted for more than three hours on Wednesday.

The outage was due to an internal technical glitch.

Trading in all securities was halted on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday following earlier reports of technical difficulties, although NYSE-listed issues was still trading on other exchanges.

After the halt, U.S. stocks extended their losses, but in low volumes, with the S&P 500 hitting a session low and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq both falling more than one per cent.

“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” the NYSE said in a tweet.

“We’re doing our utmost to produce a swift resolution & will be providing further updates as soon as we can.”

U.S. markets were in the red even before the halt, which started just after 11:30 a.m. ET, as the slide in Chinese markets spurred concerns over its impact on global economic growth.

Beijing unveiled yet another battery of measures to arrest the sell-off in shares and the securities regulator warned of “panic sentiment” gripping investors in the world’s second-largest economy.

Chinese shares have fallen more than 30 per cent in the last three weeks, and some investors fear China’s turmoil is now a bigger risk than the crisis in Greece.

“With China, investors fear that could be indicative of a broader economic weakness,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“We’ve seen commodity prices fall in the recent days and there’s the fear that China may be slowing down a lot more than previously thought.”

Copper prices fell to a six-year low and oil prices hit a three-month low.

Fears of a slow down in China will be a concern for U.S. companies, especially materials and industrial companies, which derive a chunk of their profit from the region.