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Trading on the New York Stock Exchange resumes after being halted for over three hours

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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

  • The New York Stock Exchange halted trading for over three and a half hours Wednesday. It resumed trading at 3:10 PM eastern time.
  • In tweets, the exchange said the shutdown was due to a technical issue, not a cyberattack.

  • The exchange has told traders that the problems relate to a new software update, according to an anonymous trader quoted by the New York Times's Nathaniel Popper.
  • White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said at today's briefing that "at this point there is no indication that malicious actors are involved."
  • Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said "it appears from what we know at this stage" that the stock exchange problems and earlier technical difficulties suffered by United Airlines "were not the result of any nefarious actor."
  • Earlier in the day, United Airlines had grounded all its flights for an hour due to its own technical problem. CNBC's Phil LeBeau reports that United is saying its problems were caused by, in his words, "a router that degraded network connectivity."
  • The shutdown doesn't indicate any sort of financial panic hitting the US, since other stock exchanges like NASDAQ are continuing to trade normally.