Wall Street Journal Crashes at the Worst Possible Time

Soon after apparently unrelated tech problems temporarily grounded United Airlines' fleet and led the New York Stock Exchange to abruptly freeze trading on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal also found itself failing. The newspaper's website was down for about an hour, without explanation, starting around 12:15, just as readers were arriving to find out about the meltdowns in business and finance elsewhere. Speculation on aspects of the downward spiral ranged from cyberattacks, naturally, to fallout from China's month-long stock market decline or even Greek's blossoming financial crisis. None of the affected companies said any kind of hacking played a part. United Airlines said its U.S. departure flights had been grounded after a "network connectivity issue this morning." Inconvencienced fliers of course took flight on Twitter: @united trying to get more info! Should I head to the airport? Rebook flight? Leaving out of @iah at 12:55pm. Flight 3789 @united @WGNNews Did you try turning it on and off? The New York Stock Exchange, where trading remained frozen as of 2:15 p.m., said cyberattacks had nothing to do with it. (1 of 3) The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach. (2 of 3) We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue. (3 of 3) NYSE-listed securities continue to trade unaffected on other market centers. The Journal, for its part, eventually managed to get a light version of its site back up, topped with the message "WSJ.com is having technical difficulties. The full site will return shortly." Ashley Huston, a spokeswoman for News Corp.'s Dow Jones, publisher of the Journal, said she had no further updates. An enterprising Bloomberg communications rep welcomed people to Bloomberg Business for financial updates. WSJ website is down, so come to http://t.co/sVpOHVNIrh for the latest on #NYSE (actually, you should have started there) The Journal later tweeted out word that its site was working again: We're back up—and ready for the Fed! Thanks for your patience. Yesterday, Twitter user Anonymous posted a cryptic Tweet that, in retrospect, seemed to predict the Wall Street tech malfunction, but any real connection was unclear. Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street.... we can only hope. Hackers conducted a spate of attacks against media outlets in 2013, taking over their social feeds, posting false stories and writing "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" on NPR's home page. The New York Times website also went down that year, but blamed the outage on an internal technical problem. Twitter users, as ever, were quick to dispense wisdom on Wednesday's situation. should i go stock up on bottled water and shotguns Somewhere in an airport terminal, a stock broker flying United is having the worst day of his life. ~ With contributions from Bloomberg News ~

Wall Street Journal Crashes at the Worst Possible Time

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