Commsec Website Crashes amidst Stock Market Panic
Commsec Website Crashes amidst Stock Market Panic
Januar 22, 2008: While the predictions being laid for today’s trading were forecasting disaster, there was still an aura of hope and a twinkle in many shareholders’ eyes. What’s been unleashed on the Australian Stock Exchange since it opened for trading this morning has sent many investors into a panic and this has brought one of the most popular trading websites to its knees.
Commsec is the Commonwealth Bank’s Securities section and it’s web portal is a hugely popular means of doing business, particularly for smaller investors managing their own portfolio. The doom-saying predictions that the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) would follow the rest of the world into a nose dive in share prices have proven true and sent the all ordinaries index, which is used as an average measurement of stock prices into free fall.
Most of the damage was when the market first opened, with the worst of it culminating at 10:20am and seeing more traffic on the Commsec website then it had ever anticipated. The traffic eventually brought the web server down, causing an escalation in panic levels, though this was brought back online some 15 minutes later and the telephone channels were still open for trading.
"We had unprecendented numbers of people trying to get on this morning" Commonwealth Bank of Australia spokesman, Bryan Fitzgerald told SMH."We brought in extra staff, it didn't matter what we did.”
The Commsec website is now back and in full operational status, the ASX hit on the other hand hit its worst point around midday and looked to be strengthening for an hour before continuing its decline with many nervous onlookers.