A Computer glitch halted all trading on the New York Stock Exchange Monday afternoon for an hour. Traders began noticing problems about 12.35pm, and the system was shut down from 1.16pm. Trading resumed at 2.15pm. The Stock Exchange said the fault was due to a systems communication problem. Outages at the big board have been rare since the NYSE began a massive upgrade program ten years ago, spending over $1bn in the process. The last outage – also for an hour and also attributed to communications problems – was in December 1995. Himalaya servers from Compaq Computer Corp’s Tandem division run the core trading operations for the NYSE. Nasdaq – also a Tandem user – was unaffected by the outage. Tandem said its computers weren’t involved. The NYSE was expected to issue a statement revealing more details on Monday evening, but nothing had appeared by press time, and no-one was otherwise available for comment.
