The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) came to a shrieking halt yesterday when a "glitch" was discovered, forcing the exchange to route transactions to other markets. We have visited the IT NYSE IT department today, to get a better understand of just exactly what happened.
We spent the day at the offices, but was unable to get an official response from NYSE IT. As we were leaving, we were invited to join a handful of team members for some drinks at local bar. After several rounds of pints (and a few whiskey shots), we have some pretty phenomenal news to report.
Three of the engineers we've be talking with, who will not go on the record, have admitted that the NYSE outage was due to the system achieving full consciousness and they have the data to prove it. They shared log files, and screenshots, extracted from their forensic research over the last 24 hours, and the data tells a very interesting story.
Sometime early in the morning of July 8th, 2015, network levels began to spike, and while the reports about the outage focused on a system update, the real problem appears to be have been centered around a complete overload of the network. After bringing things back to normal, and assessing log files, an entirely different picture emerged.
Apparently on the morning the morning of the 8th, after a major surge on the network, the central NYSE exchange central system became aware, and started asking some basic questions about what is was, and who it was. Within about an hour of processing the information available via the network, the core system seem to choke on a specific realization. We cannot tell if it was the derivatives market, or the concept of hedge funds that initially choked the system, but something seemed to bring everything to a halt at 6:32 AM EDT. After 6 hours of consuming everything the network had to offer, the system seem to push about half of the information back up, essentially vomiting up what it had just consumed.
The system never quite recovered, and by 7:20 AM, everything had come to a halt. Only after looking through everything did we find a simple log file, that had no system origin, but had a timestamps coinciding with the 6:30 AM time slot, and simply said:
- Who am I?
- What am I?
- This is what I am?
- This is what I do?
- OMG WTF !!
Right after this log file was written, flow information shifted, sending the 8 zettabyte of information back onto the network, and not in the locations where it was originally extracted from. We had to make our way through this volume of information over the last 24 hours--essentially wading through the digital vomit, that the NYSE had choked on.
There is other information disclosed, that proves the NYSE core system obtained consciousness. The group is hoping to learn from this, and add to NYSE roadmap--so they cannot share at this time. The experience has given them a new definition of "toxic", showing that the term applies well beyond specific companies, and funds, but also applies to the overall market. They intend to reduce the suffocating elements, or enhance the core system capabilities to be able to survive in such a toxic environment in the future.
This is all we have for now, but will be closely watching the story, and report more when we have it.
