A few days ago, trading in the Nasdaq was halted, because the computer system responsible for all buying and selling crashed. A “technical issue” was blamed for the outage, and the Nasdaq stock market halted all trading in shares listed on its exchange. In addition, the market requested fellow exchanges to do the same.

The New York Stock Exchange did so but continued normal trading in its own shares. Usually, when a stock exchange experiences technical problems, the orders can be routed via other exchanges, but in this case it was impossible. In addition, Nasdaq had difficulties with putting a timeframe on when it expected to be up and running properly.

The downtime brought the exchange to a virtual standstill, with some trades in names listed on Nasdaq trickling in through alternative venues. The outage also had a knock on effect on Nasdaq stocks including Google, Apple and Facebook to far smaller companies. For example, Google and Apple’s share prices flat-lined entirely.

The experts noted it reminded them of the terrible spring last year when technical issues stuffed up the trade confirmations of Facebook, resulting in the significant delay of trading open. A few days ago, Goldman Sachs stuffed up options prices because of a trading glitch which led to a series of erroneous trades.