Wake-up call: Tech glitches bring down NYSE, United Airlines (video)

Even in this day and age, a simple computer glitch can take down an airline and a stock exchange. I'm Bridget Carey, this is your CNET Update. [MUSIC] Various computer glitches have wreaked havoc on the business world Wednesday, halting trading on the New York Stock Exchange and causing United Airlines to ground its flights. Even the Wall Street Journal website experienced a brief outage, but as of this report, the United States Department of Homeland Security said there's no sign that these were part of a malicious cyber attack. The Stock Exchange's Twitter account tweeted that it chose to suspend trading because of an internal computer problem, and it's not a result of a cyber breach. Around 11:30 AM Eastern time, the Stock Exchange was brought to a halt, and it was down for almost four hours. There have been glitches before on exchanges, but nothing that suspended trading this long in recent years. Other exchanges such as NASDAQ continued to operate. Now, before the computer chaos on Wall Street, United Airlines was dealing with network connectivity issues. That grounded flights worldwide for almost two hours. More than 4900 flights were disrupted. And United was offering waivers for customers to change their flights. A United spokeswoman released this statement to various news outlets, that this all was because of a router problem. Which disrupted the passenger reservation system. It's truly a wake-up call to see how one glitch can still be enough to cripple a system worldwide. Meanwhile, there's other drama going on at Microsoft. The company is not giving up in it's mobile phone fight but it is making big cuts to change it's strategy and focus. Microsoft is laying off 7800 employees. And most of these people worked on Windows phone hardware. These employees came from Nokia's phone division, which Microsoft acquired last year for more than 7.2 billion dollars. Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, said in an email to employees that the company is doing this to run a more effective and focused phone lineup. He added that it'll help Microsoft reinvent its mobile side. So, what does it all mean? Microsoft still plans to make Lumia phones and it's continuing to release Windows 10. In fact, we're expecting some new Windows Lumia phones to come out later this year to be loaded with the new Windows 10 mobile operating system. But what's hard to tell right now is if Microsoft will keep making its own phones in-house or if it will outsource all of its manufacturing. Microsoft does a little bit of both right now. In his short time as leader of Microsoft Now Dell has made some major cuts to bring the focus more on software and the cloud. Now Dell has also made more Microsoft apps available on iPhone and Android you see Microsoft just want you using it's software regardless of what phone you own. That's it for this tech news update but there's always more at cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey. [NOISE]