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.
Google Finance is a newcomer to the finance world. The clean interface allows users to store multiple portfolios and get an active Flash quote sheet that tags the latest news along the time period.
Yahoo Finance is one of the most active financial sites on the Web. The finance message boards are active and the site allows custom portfolios. Along with integration into the standard Yahoo account, users can customize the look of data and display key statistics. Yahoo! Finance provides a set of financial resources that range from investment and company information to personal financial management tools. Free tools are provided to help users manage their personal finances, as well as gather data,...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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