An algorithmic trading software bug is being blamed for a day of wild swings at the New York Stock Exchange – and has resulted in the trader placing the dodgy orders reporting a $US440 million pre-tax loss.

This story is about software reliability rather than hardware.

It’s a conversation I always get into when talking about fault tolerant stuff as experience tells us that it is very often the hardware blipping first that causes unpredictable behaviour in the software. These transient errors often manifest themselves as software malfunctions or crashes.

Now I am not speculating (get it?) that this $440M loss is due to some dodgy hardware, but it could have been as the company merely stated that it was a technology issue.

You bet it was!

Really brings home the value of assured uptime and why these types of systems need to be working correctly.