All trading halted on New York Stock Exchange Floor, WSJ.com down

Without announcement, all trading ceased on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as of 11:32am on Wednesday.

While off-floor trading is still occurring, every listing on the NYSE board is currently showing “HALT” and/or “No Quotation.”

The NYSE has released a statement stating that trading has halted due to a technology issue and that they are working to restore trading as quickly as possible.

At 2pm NYSE Group President Tom Farley told CNBC that trading was expected to resume by 2:45pm 3:10pm. The exchange returned to full operation at exactly that time.

With no known relationship, the Wall Street Journal’s online site has also become unavailable during the same period displaying an odd 504 error instead of the usual 404 – not found. When navigating to WSJ.com, the following appeared as of 11:50am Wednesday before the site returned to service around 12:35pm.

Reports are surfacing that people on the west coast are able to see the Wall Street Journal online while those in the eastern half of the U.S. cannot.

Popular economics website ZeroHedge.com also experienced an outage this morning, but has since returned to service. A post at the popular econo blog said that “This morning we experienced an unprecedented surge in traffic which brought our servers to a grinding halt.”

U.S. officials are stating that there is no evidence, at this time, of any relationship of the NYSE outage to the United Airlines system outage and that hacking is not currently suspected in the NYSE outage.

The trading halt and WSJ site outage comes just hours behind the release of a ground stop experienced by United Airlines when its flight automation system became unusable yesterday.