Will the internet destroy us before the Large Hadron Collider gets a chance?

[immts007]

Wow. This is frightenting. UAL lost $1.14 Billion in market value yesterday based on 2 year old story and with almost no human intervention.

I for one welcome our new automated script overlords.

"The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story."

I'm sure that computer glitch has adversley affected some lives.

[worst_shot_ever]

I wonder if United has a cause of action against Google for negligently causing a sell off of UA stock?

[immts007]

I wonder if United has a cause of action against Google for negligently causing a sell off of UA stock?

I'm sure that is being examined by a fleet of lawyers, but I don't think it has much merit.

Don't you think the brokerages who decided it was a good idea to trigger massive sell off's based on web-crawling software that are more at fault?