Nasdaq OMX, the parent company of the Nasdaq Stock Market, said the outage lasted six minutes -- from 11:35 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time to 11:41 a.m.
The outage occurred in one of Nasdaq's quote dissemination channels, which are used to provide real-time price quotes on stocks. The companies affected by the outage had stock tickers PC through SPZ.
According to Nasdaq OMX's preliminary review, the outage was caused by a hardware failure on one the exchange's servers. A secondary system took over soon after. Wednesday's trading ended normally, Nasdaq said.
The outage is the latest technical difficulty to hit the exchange, which endured a three-hour trading outage on August 22. That outage was also blamed on the exchange's price quote disseminating system.
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