It soon became apparent that the message was false. The Twitter account had been hacked by the so-called Syrian Electronic Army , a hacker collective that had taken over the Twitter account of Reuters a year earlier. The false message was corrected fairly quickly. A White House spokesman even had to be called in to declare that President Obama was fine and in excellent health.
AP Hacked
Panic struck among investors
The American stock market reacted almost immediately to this news. Panic among investors struck and machines took list to data over the work. Kevin Polcari, working for investment firm O´Neill Securities, said the following about this:
“That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders – you don’t even have time to react as a human being.”
Before the Dow Jones Index rebounded, it lost 140 points. Reuters estimates that the temporary loss of market capitalization in the S&P 500 alone was about $136.5 billion.
Dow Jones Index drops
Art Hogan, who works for the firm Lazard Capital Markets, said the following about the stock market crash:
“We’re in an environment where we’re sensitive to any news that sounds like terrorism. That makes it that much more believable. That’s the tricky part. When something like AP gets hacked, it becomes reality for a period of time, until it’s not.”
Previous Flash Crashes
It is not the first time that machines have gone crazy. On May 6, 2010, the stock market crashed for the first ukraine business directory time as a result of high-frequency trading algorithms. In no time, the Dow Jones index lost nine percent of its value. Money disappeared like snow in the sun. A few minutes later, the stock m the 10 unforgivable sins of list to data arket bounced back and recovered.