As the humankind becomes increasingly digitized , thing become more efficient and integrate , but they also become more vulnerable to hacking , corruption , and glitches . Even the slight of hiccups can set off a chain of events that cause an upset , as the globular stock market discovered on Tuesday this hebdomad .

As reported by theFinancial Times , a coding fault of some sort drive the share of giant US applied science companies – including Apple , Amazon , Microsoft , and Google - owning Alphabet – to the same price of $ 123.47 .

Stocks with some of these companies are usually much high , at around the $ 900 to $ 1,000 mark . This sudden change mean that their gillyflower values fell dramatically , with Amazon ’s dropping by 87 percent and Alphabet ’s bottoming out by 86 percent .

Amusingly , other company with generally far lower average share values saw their stock prices jump into the stratosphere . Microsoft , for example , saw its share spike by 80 percent . As bespeak out by theTelegraph , this meant the company was briefly valued at $ 1 trillion – about two - thirds of the gross interior product of Canada – as opposed to around $ 290 billion .

The error , mean to have pop out when financial selective information provider incorrectly translate a data test of some variety as real - sentence stock prices , cause an intense mo of utter pandemonium on trading floors .

Nasdaq , the American line of descent central responsible for the chaos , is presently looking into exactly what went unseasonable during the after - trading hours on Independence Day . Perhaps someone start the festivities a little too betimes and distributed the psychometric test data by mistake .

" As part of its normal process , the UTP distributed test data and certain third parties improperly disseminate the datum , " aspokesmansaid . " Nasdaq is mold with third - party vendors to solve the matter . "

Either way , as the markets had closed for July 4 solemnization , and the prices of the stocks werenot actually changed , the error will have no event on international trading or breed markets .

This is by no means the first prison term a bug has do trouble on trading floors . Back in the summertime of 2013 , a computer freeze give up all trading with Nasdaq for three time of day ; in 2015 , the New York Stock Exchange went down for four hr just after China ’s stock market had a meltdown and Greece was suffering from a major debt crisis .

The most negative incident since the 2008 recession was arguably the“flash crash”of 2010 , when the Dow Jones dropped 1,000 points in a few transactions all because a sell cost and prison term frame was pretermit from a massive sale . Whoops .