A number of Nasdaq-listed tech companies saw their share prices swing in either direction after ‘bad data’ was improperly used by third-parties.
A data glitch has set the share prices of a number of Nasdaq-listed companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft at exactly $123.47 on Monday evening.
Amazon saw its share price tumble from an opening price of $972.79 a share, while game developer Zynga experienced a 33-fold hike from an opening price of $3.65.
The share prices of companies such as Facebook were unaffected by the glitch, though it is unclear at this stage why.
In a statement, Nasdaq attributed the incident to the “improper use” of data that was distributed by the Unlisted Trading Privileges (UTP) as part of normal evening test procedures.
“Any data messages received post 5:16 PM should be deemed as test data and purged from direct data recipient’s databases,” the second-biggest US exchange said in a statement.
“UTP is asking all third parties to revert to Nasdaq Official Closing Prices effective at 5:16 PM.”
The problem affected financial websites that rely on Nasdaq’s data feed such as Bloomberg, Google Finance, Reuters, and Yahoo Finance.
This is not the first time an exchange has experienced problems due to technical glitches.
Nasdaq suffered a breakdown in May 2012 that suspended trading for more than three hours, delaying the start of Facebook’s public flotation. Another outage in August that year saw public trading come to a halt for three hours due to a connectivity issue between an unnamed exchange participant and the Securities Information Processor.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) went down for four hours in midday trading mid-2015, at the height of China’s stock market meltdown and the Greek debt crisis.
The NYSE said it had to halt trading due to residual “communication issues” between customer gateways and trading units following a software update.
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) experienced a series of technical issues and errors in September last year due to hardware failure. The ASX had experienced three outages over the last decade prior to the incident.
Source: zdnet.com
