On Thursday the Nasdaq Market suffered what they claimed was a glitch in their system which caused them to halt all trading for approximately three hours, which locked up trading in stocks with a total market capitalization of $5.7 trillion.
Taken alone, this so-called glitch, while concerning, would be nothing more than a newsflash, it happened, it ended, situation over, but over the last two weeks there have been other "glitches" and "outages" and "technical errors."
One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that it is all a little too coincidental.
August 14, 2013- Microsoft's Outlook, SkyDrive, and People technologies experienced problems, making it difficult for some people to access the cloud services. August 18- Microsoft says it has fully recovered from a service outage that affected some users.
August 16, 2013- Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40%
August 19, 2013 - Amazon.com, the website of the world's largest online retailer, went down today for many users across the United States and Canada.
August 20, 2013- A flood of erroneous trades hit U.S. equity options markets on Tuesday as they opened for business when Goldman Sachs Group sent orders accidentally because of a technical error, the latest trading problem to hit the options market this year.
Nasdaq, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Goldman Sachs-- Two is a coincidence, three really bad luck, but five?
[Update] Make that six, a reader just emailed me with an August 7, 2013 link- Outages effect App Store, iBookstore, Mac App Store, and iTunes for some users today.
Is it possible we are seeing a test of the Internet Kill Switch?