United fiasco prompts networking confessions

Yesterday’s grounding of the United Airlines fleet, which the company has blamed on a routing mishap of some kind, has prompted readers of Reddit’s section devoted to networking to share their worst workplace screw-ups and the consequences of same.  

There are almost 200 tales and comments, but there is one that stands out from the rest:

We were removing old trading workstations in the Chicago pits during a Globex/Dealing upgrade. We were told to just use snips to cut the towers free. I cut the wrong damn line. An entire wall of stations and displays went down including the big index board. Commodities quotes from NY went dead. Trading was halted at CME/CBOE for 3 f***ing hours. I single handedly caused the most expensive technical market glitch in Chicago exchange history up to that point. I halted an estimated $ 3b in trades.

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