Following up on yesterday's story about the 500 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrials, AP now reports that it was caused by a computer glitch compounded by a failover to a backup computer system:
Dow Jones & Co., the media company that manages the well-known index of 30 blue chip stocks, said it discovered shortly before 2 p.m. that its computers weren't properly handling the day's huge volume in trades at the New York Stock Exchange.
It switched to a backup computer, and the result was a massive swoon in the index as the secondary system took over processing shortly before 3 p.m.
Link (thanks, Jon)
