Input error causes Dow Jones chaos

A dramatic fall in the Dow Jones industrial average appears to have been caused by a trader hitting the button for 'billion' not 'million', reports Computing.co.uk.

The Dow Jones fell by nearly 1 000 points, and the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange announced that all trades more than 60% above or below market that occurred between 2.40pm and 3.00pm New York time would be cancelled.

"We don't know what caused it," says Procter & Gamble spokeswoman Jennifer Chelune. "We know that that was an electronic trade, and we're looking into it with Nasdaq and the other major electronic exchanges."

PHD Virtual Technologies has unveiled the PHD Virtual Xpress Backup for Citrix XenServer, says ServerWatch.

According to the company, the new backup and recovery solution is purpose-built for the growing number of virtualised XenServer environments and is certified Citrix Ready.

PHD Virtual also provides a collaborative path to integrate with all major physical backup solutions (including products from Data Domain, Quantum, Symantec, EMC, HP, IBM) for end-to-end data protection throughout the enterprise.

It's time to update your crisis management plan, according to a report by Gartner, since the ash cloud from the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano caused an epic disruption in air travel and stranded thousands of people last month, states Computerworld.

"Take advantage of the publicity surrounding this event ... to raise internal awareness of your organisation's vulnerability to transportation outages," the Gartner report advised. It noted that for the past 2 000 years, the larger Katla volcano has always erupted after Eyjafjallajokull.

The first priority is to help stranded employees find alternate transportation, accommodations and workspaces, the report stated. And that requires a central system that tracks which employees are in transit.