How One Piece of Hardware Took Down a $6 Trillion Stock Market
- Data storage and distribution device brought down Tokyo market
- Stock exchange forced to close trading for the entire day
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At 7:04 a.m. on an autumn Thursday in Tokyo, the stewards of the world’s third-largest equity market realized they had a problem.
A data device critical to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s trading system had malfunctioned, and the automatic backup had failed to kick in. It was less than an hour before the system, called Arrowhead, was due to start processing orders in the $6 trillion equity market. Exchange officials could see no solution.