Investing.com -- Trading of all securities on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended on Wednesday morning, as officials said technical issues, not a cyber breach, triggered a systemwide halt at the world's largest exchange
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told CNN there were no signs of malicious activity contributing to the halt, while NBC News reported that there were no indications that a cyberattack was responsible for the shutdown. In response to the trading halt that began at 11:32 a.m., NYSE officials said it cancelled all open orders at the time of the suspension.
"The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach," NYSE officials said on their official Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) account. "We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue. NYSE-listed securities continue to trade unaffected on other market centers."
There were also no indications that the halt was related to a technical glitch that grounded thousands of passengers on United Continental Holdings Inc (NYSE:UAL) flights on Wednesday morning. An issue with a router degraded network connectivity for the airlines' various applications, causing an operational disruption, a United Airlines spokesperson said in a statement. The issues related to the router disruption were fixed shortly after as the airlines restored normal functioning, United added.
U.S. stocks fell slightly after trading on the exchange was halted. Roughly an hour after the suspension, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 200 points or 1.18% at 17,568.64. Both the NASDAQ Composite index and the S&P 500 Composite index were down by more than 1.3% on the session.
The technical glitch appears to be the worst outage at the New York Stock Exchange since June 12, 2009 when trading was halted for approximately 30 minutes due to a computer malfunction.