Gadgetory

even in this day and age a simple computer glitch can take down an airline had a stock exchange I'm Bridget Carey this is your cnet update various computer glitches have wrecked havoc on the business world Wednesday halting trading on the new york stock exchange and causing united airlines to ground its flights even The Wall Street Journal website experienced a brief outage but as of this report the United States Department of Homeland Security said there's no sign that these were part of a malicious cyber attack the stock exchanges Twitter account tweeted that it chose to suspend trading because of an internal computer problem and it's not the result of a cyber breach around 1130am eastern time the stock exchange was brought to a halt and it was down for almost four hours there have been glitches before on exchanges but nothing that suspended trading this long in recent years other exchanges such as nasdaq continued to operate before the computer chaos on Wall Street United Airlines was dealing with network connectivity issues that grounded flights worldwide for almost two hours more than 4,900 flights were disrupted and United was offering waivers for customers to change their flights a united spokeswoman released a statement to various news outlets that this all was because of a router problem which disrupted the passenger reservation system it's truly a wake up call to see how one glitch can still be enough to cripple a system worldwide meanwhile there's other drama going on at Microsoft the company is not giving up in its mobile phone fight but it is making big cuts to change its strategy and focus Microsoft is laying off 7800 employees and most of these people worked on Windows Phone hardware these employees came from Nokia's phone division which microsoft acquired last year for more than 7.2 billion dollars Microsoft's chief executive satya nadella said in an email to employees that the company is doing this to run a more effective and focused phone line up and he added that it'll help Microsoft reinvent its mobile side so what does it all mean Microsoft still plans to make Lumia phones and its continuing to release windows 10 mobile in we're expecting some new Windows Lumia phones to come out later this year to be loaded with the new windows 10 mobile operating system but what's hard to tell right now as if Microsoft will keep making its own phones in house or if it'll outsource all of its manufacturing Microsoft does a little bit of both right now in his short time as leader of Microsoft nadella has made some major cuts to bring the focus more on software and the cloud nadella has also made more Microsoft apps available on iPhone and Android you see Microsoft just wants you using its software regardless of what phone you own that's it for this tech news update but there's always more at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey