Senators may seek briefing on NYSE outage

Lawmakers are giving the New York Stock Exchange some time to investigate a technical glitch that led to a three-hour halt in trading on Wednesday.

But come next week, several senators could seek more information on what caused the outage, which the NYSE has attributed to a software update gone awry.

{mosads}“I’m certainly going to ask for those briefings next week,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees a number of Internet issues, told The Hill. “Probably with the intelligence community.”

The NYSE went down on the same day that a United Airlines network connectivity issue grounded flights for several hours, and The Wall Street Journal homepage stopped loading for a brief period.

Nelson told reporters Wednesday that the series of events had “the appearance of a cyberattack.” 

There’s no indication the incidents are related, but it has raised questions on Capitol Hill.

“I want to get more information,” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told The Hill. “Right now, what we’re hearing is nothing nefarious, no hacking. But I’d like to give United, New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street Journal, give them the time to scour their systems, and confirm that before I really take any further action.”

Security experts have not spotted any indications that hackers were behind the stock exchange outage but caution that it’s too soon to know for sure.

“Whatever it is,” Nelson told The Hill, “it’s a full warning that the cyberattacks are coming.”

While the financial industry is seen as a cybersecurity leader, experts caution that banking and stock exchange networks are still riddled with exploitable flaws.

For now, Johnson wants to let investigators do their job before drawing any broad conclusions.

“I’d say right now there’s not enough information to say whether we need a briefing or not,” he said.