Apparently, somebody didn’t get the memo. On the afternoon of July 3, the Nasdaq stock exchange closed three hours early in advance of the Independence Day holiday. At that time, Nasdaq—in a test that had been announced to its data partners a week before—pushed out some manufactured stock quote data as part of a test of its systems. However, some of that data was apparently published inadvertently by multiple financial websites, including Google and Bloomberg.
The data errantly published was sent as part of a test of Nasdaq’s UTP (“unlisted trading privileges”) Quotation Data Feed, which serves up quotation data to a collection of market data vendors. “As part of its normal process, Nasdaq distributed test data and certain third parties improperly propagated the data,” a Nasdaq spokesperson told Ars via e-mail. “Nasdaq is working with these third party vendors to resolve the matter.”
As a result, people monitoring stocks such as Apple and Amazon got a bit of a late-day shock—wild fluctuations in price quotes. At 7:30pm Eastern time, a quote for Amazon showed the company’s stock price at $123.45, which would have been an 87.25 percent drop from its actual value. Apple’s stock followed suit, to the same $123.45 value, at 7:56pm Eastern Time. (A few minutes later, Apple stock surged back to $645.713, what would have been a 348 percent apparent gain.) Microsoft also saw wild price quote fluctuations—at one point, the company would have been valued at $1 trillion based on the Nasdaq data published.
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