Computer glitches make bad day for geeks
High-profile technology problems in business world aren’t related, government officials say
Wednesday was a rough day for tech: United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and the Wall Street Journal all suffered technology problems that upended service.
NEW YORK — It was a rough day for tech: A major airline, its oldest stock exchange, and a prominent business newspaper all suffered technology problems that upended service for parts of the day.
Government officials said that it did not appear that the incidents were related, or the result of sabotage, counter to an endless stream of jokes and conspiracy theories posted on Facebook and Twitter — and even the suspicions of FBI Director James Comey.
“In my business, you don’t love coincidences,” Comey told Congress Wednesday. “But it does appear that there is not a cyber-intrusion involved.”
First a “router issue” at United Airlines suspended all of the company’s flights for nearly two hours, leading to delays and cancellations. Then before noon a “technical problem” at the New York Stock Exchange halted trading. In the midst of that, the Wall Street Journal’s site, WSJ.com, had “technical difficulties” that sent readers to a temporary site while the paper worked to fix the problem.
“The problem is humans can’t keep up with all the technology they have created,” said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner. “It’s becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Our best hope may be that computers eventually will become smart enough to maintain themselves.”
Technology makes life easier and the economy more efficient, allowing for nearly instantaneous flow of information and communication and for remote control of far-flung operations. Until it fails.
And technology prob- lems like Wednesday’s that temporarily knock out vital services and conveniences of modern life are likely to become more common as computers and other electronic devices increasingly connect together over the Internet.
It may be that we are rushing to push technology into business operations and our daily lives before it is fully ready, experts caution. Lillian Ablon, a technology researcher for the Rand Corp. says the confluence of breakdowns should be interpreted as a wake-up call to companies and engineers to program their networks to protect them against inevitable glitches and malicious attacks by outsiders.
“Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start,” she said. “We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things.”
The length of Wednesday’s outages also is disconcerting, Gartner’s Litan said.
It took the New York Stock Exchange until 3:10 p.m. — just over three and a half hours — to resume trading. “I think everyone needs to assume technology is going to go down sometimes, but you should be resilient enough to quickly recover from the outage within a half hour, if not a few minutes,” Litan said.
The New York Stock Exchange didn’t say what caused its malfunction but described it as internal and not the result of hackers.
The broader stock market stayed open as orders to buy and sell kept flowing to the Nasdaq and other exchanges around the country.
By the end of the day, stocks slid to a four-month low, with China’s equity rout igniting a wave of risk aversion and the Federal Reserve signaling concern over the turmoil there and in Greece.