As you probably know, the Nasdaq stock market was shut down for three hours yesterday afternoon due to software problems. The big fear after one of these is that the market might take a sudden downward lurch once everything is back online, but that didn't happen yesterday; the Nasdaq index finished up a quiet 1.1 percent for the day.
This isn't the first time an exchange has had to shut down. Last October, Superstorm Sandy forced the closure of the New York Stock Exchange for full two trading days. Between 1995 and 2001, the NYSE had to shut down three separate times over electronic problems.
And a generation ago, the Nasdaq had to deal with even more embarrassing issues. On two separate occasions, in 1987 and 1994, a squirrel chewed through power lines near the exchange's headquarters in Connecticut, creating power outages that caused the market to close down. Near as anyone knows, there were no squirrels involved in yesterday's shutdown.
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