[fsckin]

I would rarely suggest this, but if something is so incredibly broken that you're loosing money at a rate of 800 million dollars per hour, screw the customers.

Turn it off at any cost. If you are forthcoming and transparent, customers will understand.

[pheon]

Point is you dont know what the loss is.

1) They bought too much stock (incorrectly)

2) realized WTF, stopped everything

2a) more likely their clients said WTF is wrong first

3) had to sell the stock for the rest of the day.

Its only after they sold everything did the $440MM price tag surface. Hopefully they sold most of their positions to goldman (instead free market) so one of their investors made a boatload of cash.. giving them favorable terms for a line of credit.

[sp332]

This is wrong. The algorithm was buying and selling constantly, sometimes losing small amounts of money (usually about $15) each time, sometimes as often as 20-40 times per second for each of about 150 symbols.

[wtracy]

Another thread here has a link to a blog post with (admittedly speculative) evidence that, at two different times, they tried rebooting the system only to have it come back up and start making random trades again.