Wall Street employee accidentally causes stock market crash

The mistake of a lax employee has sent shockwaves through the financial world and wiped billions of dollars off the charts for some of the world’s largest companies.

If you thought you were having a bad day at the office, think about this Wall Street employee who single-handedly brought down the US stock market.

A simple human error reportedly caused wild swings and volatility on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as it opened trading in the morning.

More than 250 companies experienced wild swings in just a few minutes, with shares moving 25 percent from their normal market value.

Major brand names became involved in the catastrophe, including McDonalds, Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley.

Tens of billions of dollars were wiped out in market value.

As the confusion set in, the NYSE opened up and admitted the root cause of the error was manual error.

According to Bloomberg, an employee at the NYSE’s backup data center allegedly failed to properly shut down Cermak’s disaster recovery system, which caused the crisis.

The root of the problem lies in the fact that by leaving the backup system on, the exchange computers thought that trading had not stopped since the day before.

As a result, some stocks behaved as if trading had already begun, with no opening prices set, sending the market into a meltdown.

The regulator, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, said it was investigating the matter.

The NYSE said it will nullify the trades executed with incorrect prices.

In total, about 4,341 trades went through that should be aborted or canceled, the NYSE said in a market update.

About 84 stocks were affected and flagged as anomalous, the exchange added.

And it wasn’t just the NYSE that was affected.

The chaos had spillover effects that spread to Nasdaq, CBOE Global Markets and private locations.

The total cost of the disaster is still unclear.

Under exchange rules, the NYSE may have to foot the bill and pay hefty fees.

Companies caught up in the chaos have until Friday local time (so Saturday) to report the financial damage they have incurred.

Ironically, the NYSE workers bust didn’t even take place in New York, but 700 miles from Wall Street.

Since the 9/11 terror incident at the Twin Towers, the NYSE has had a secondary location in case something knocks out headquarters capabilities.

Accordingly, the error occurred at the exchange’s location in Chicago.

The co-founder of professional trading firm Themis Trading LLC, Joseph Saluzzi, was far from impressed by the debacle.

They’re going to have to come up with something better, he told Bloomberg. While systems fail, and we understand that, there is no tolerance when it comes to opening and closing.

Australia is facing its own technological disaster with its own stock market, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

The ASX spent a whopping $250 million ($274 million) to replace its aging technology system known as CHESS, only for the new project to implode.

As a result, the ASX goes back to basics and starts all over again.