Bear had endured more than its share of self-inflicted wounds in the previous year, but there was no reason it had to die that week in March. There has never been anything on Wall Street to compare to it: a “run” on a major investment bank, caused in large part not by a criminal indictment or some mammoth quarterly loss but by rumor and innuendo that, as best one can tell, had little basis in fact. The fall of Bear Stearns wasn’t just another financial collapse. Bear had about $18 billion in cash reserves. It was then, questioning his trading desks downstairs, that Molinaro first heard the rumor: Bear was having liquidity troubles, Wall Street’s way of saying the firm was running out of money. Molinaro sat in his sixth-floor corner office, overlooking Madison Avenue, catching up on paperwork after a week-long trip visiting European investors. His replacement, an easygoing 58-year-old investment banker named Alan Schwartz, was down at the Breakers resort in Palm Beach that morning, rubbing elbows with News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and Viacom’s Sumner Redstone at Bear’s annual media conference. Bear’s swashbuckling C.E.O., 74-year-old Jimmy Cayne, pilloried as a detached figure who played bridge and rounds of golf while his firm was in crisis, had been ousted in January. At the time, rumors flew it would go bankrupt. The nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, known for its notoriously freewheeling-some would say maverick-culture, Bear had pledged to fork over more than $3 billion the previous summer to bail out one of its two hedge funds that had bet heavily on subprime loans. Molinaro, 50, Bear’s popular chief financial officer, thought he could spot the first rays of daylight at the end of nine solid months of nonstop crisis. Still, as he drove in from his Connecticut home to the glass-sheathed Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Bear Stearns, Sam Molinaro wasn’t expecting trouble. In what the economists called a “credit crisis,” the big banks were so spooked they had all but stopped lending money, a trend which, if it continued, would spell disaster on 21st-century Wall Street, where trading firms routinely borrow as much as 50 times the cash in their accounts to trade complex financial instruments such as derivatives. The mortgage market had crashed major companies like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had written off billions of dollars in bad loans. Reddit and Twitch were also affected by the outage.On Monday, March 10, Wall Street was tense, as it had been for months. However, major websites are dependent on a few companies for their functionality. One customer had a bug in June that caused Fastly's CDN to go down. This outage shows that the web is not decentralized as it is supposed to be. The internet problems also affected gaming services. DownDetector reported a spike of over 40,000 users who were having issues with the PlayStation Network, and the Steam store also had functionality issues. DownDetector also reported problems with Call of Duty and Fortnite. Sony's PSN status page acknowledged an issue shortly before we published this post: "PlayStation Network services are up and running, but there are external, internet-wide issues that might affect your experience," the company wrote.Īs far as more essential services, a number of banks' websites also appeared to have been rendered non-functional during the outage, and there were reports of 911 systems being down across multiple states. It is, however, unclear if the emergency services outage was related to the other web outages - the Sheriff's Department of Grayson County, Virginia, reported that its 911 outage stemmed from a fiber cut, which has now reportedly been fixed. Many websites attributed the outages to Akamai, making it clear that Akamai was responsible. The New York Metro Transportation Authority (NYMTA) and The Times of India tweeted that Akamai was responsible for their outages. Cloudflare's CEO has chimed in to say that its service isn't to blame. Many sites appear to be functional again after Akamai, a content delivery network that hosts much of the internet, started rolling out a fix to its service. "We continue to monitor the situation, and can confirm that this was not the result of a hacker attack on Akamai platform," Akamai writes to The Verge. Consumers were unable access services such as Ally Bank and Fidelity, Sony’s PlayStation Network, Airbnb, or Ally Bank. Many airline websites were also affected, including those of Southwest, British Airways, Delta, and British Airways.
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