Were the computer glitches at NYSE, United and WSJ hacks ?

On Wednesday morning computer outages grounded all United Airlines flights. Later in the morning, at 11:32am, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it was ceasing all trading due to "computer glitches" for almost four hours. At the same time the NYSE went down, the Wall Street Journal website went offline for hours, as well as a popular financial blog Zero Hedge.

Trading at the NYSE resumed at 3:10pm ET. In a brief announcement, the exchange said it was experiencing a "internal technical issue." The NYSE said later in a tweet that it's "not the result of a cyber breach," rather "the root cause was determined to be a configuration issue." The White House announced "there is no indication that there are malicious actors involved." The Department of Homeland Security said that there is "no sign of malicious activity" at the NYSE or at United Airlines, and the FBI confirmed "no further law enforcement action is needed at this time."

So, were the outages really technical problems that coincidentally happened at the same time ?

Despite official lines saying none of these incidents were related, many believe it was too much of a coincidence that everything happened on the same day, around the same time.

At 11:45pm on Tuesday evening, in a totally unrelated bit of information ;), one of the most popular 'Anonymous" hacking group twitter accounts @YourAnonNews tweeted: "Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall street.... We can only hope."

The second bit of information from antivirus pioneer John McAfee writing for IBTimes UK claims that "dark conversations between hackers" who have links to Anonymous congratulated themselves on "a job well done on Wall Street".

Of course these are just conspiracy theories, you decide whether to trust them or the official government version, we are just here to share some interesting facts.

A bit more information can be found -here- and -here-.