NEW YORK —It was already a tough day in the market when the unexpected hit.
The New York Stock Exchange halted trading late Wednesday morning because of technical trouble.
The outage came as traders had plenty of other things to worry about.
Concerns about China’s plunging stock market and a logjam in talks between Greece and its creditors weighed on the mood. Major indexes already were falling before the shutdown, which occurred shortly after 11:30 a.m. EDT. NYSE resumed trading 50 minutes before the close.
The exchange, in a statement late Wednesday, attributed the malfunction to a “configuration issue” and not as the result of hackers. An NYSE spokeswoman would not provide further details.
The broader stock market stayed open as orders to buy and sell kept flowing to the Nasdaq and other exchanges around the country.
Tom Caldwell, who runs an investment firm with stakes in several exchanges, said there are about 60 exchanges and trading venues that can take orders when one goes down, so investors shouldn’t get rattled.
“It’s disruptive but not wildly disruptive,” said Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities.
President Barack Obama was briefed on the NYSE situation, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Officials told Obama there were no malicious actors involved.
By day’s end, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 34.66 points, or 1.7 percent, to close at 2,046.68. The Dow Jones industrial average dipped 261.49 points, or 1.5 percent, to 17,515.42, and the Nasdaq slid 87.70 points, or 1.8 percent, to 4,909.76.
Portfolio manager Mark Spellman of Alpine Funds said an outage similar to Wednesday’s would have caused panic a few decades ago, when the NYSE dominated the market.
“Only 15 to 20 percent of global stock exchange trading happens on the NYSE these days,” he said. “Things are so spread out.”
