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At around 8:26 AM, United grounded all flights and blamed a "network connectivity issue." Flights resumed about an hour later. Almost exactly three hours after the United grounding, trading stopped on Wall Street, with officials citing an unnamed glitch. Less than an hour after that, the Wall Street Journal's website went down.So yeah, this was a bizarre morning.Sometime during the Wednesday morning cyber-clusterfuck, President Obama was briefed, according to the Guardian. Members of the press were also briefed by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. He told America not to panic, and said, "The officials at the stock exchange are working feverishly, as you would expect."A tweet from the "signal booster" account for the operations of Anonymous, the loose hacker collective, began to attract retweets late on Wednesday morning as the situation grew weirder.
That tweet had gone up on Tuesday, suggesting that whoever runs the account might have known something fishy was about to happen. But the prospect of Anonymous mischief was promptly contradicted by the NYSE's own Twitter account.Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street…. we can only hope.
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews)July 8, 2015
(1 of 3) The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach.
— NYSE (@NYSE)July 8, 2015
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Check back in to find out if anything interesting actually happens at 5PM. We'll keep you posted.UPDATE: We checked out the scene around 5 PM, but not much was happening. If Anonymous was trying to flood Wall Street, it looks like their secret weapon was light rain.FLOOD WALL STREET AT 5PM EDT. | — Anonymous (@AnonyInfo)July 8, 2015