The Web Struggling To Keep Up With The Stock Market Crash/Bounce

In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but now it’s bouncing back. But you’d be forgiven if you have no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because frankly, it’s struggling to keep up.

It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance, meanwhile is completely down. Trying to look for the news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc. The problem is that the “realtime” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing.

Then the bounce started happening and people were still tweeting about the Dow being down 1,000. The problem? It was actually down only like 100 at that point. It’s like whiplash out there on the web right now.

So where else do you turn? Well if you loaded up CNN.com while the crash was occurring, you wouldn’t have even known anything was happening. It was only well after the bounce started occurring that they site had a banner up that the Dow was down 900. And again, the bounce was already happening at that point.

Update: CNBC is reporting that the a typo may have caused at least a part of the sell-off.

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble.

Whoops.

Update 2: Yahoo has reached out about the Yahoo Finance downtime:

“Yahoo! Finance experienced intermittent issues related to traffic from today’s market activity.  We will continue to monitor and resolve the issue as necessary.”

They also tweeted about it. It’s just now back to normal.