During one of the largest stock market plunges in American history, Online and mobile-based financial sites were brought to their knees yesterday under the weight of worrisome investors scrambling for information and answers.
Portals like Yahoo and Google Finance went down hard after news broke that the stock market was losing equity fast for relatively unknown reasons, forcing people all of the world to take to their mobile devices and computers in search of additional information.
At about 11:15 a.m. PDT Thursday, various U.S. stock indexes, including the Dow Jones, plummeted on fears that the current mess in Greece could spread throughout Europe. At one point, the Dow Jones was off more than 8 percent from its opening level. With rumors circulating that the cause could have even stemmed from a trader’s error in entering a “b” for billion instead “m” for million, the ambiguity surrounding the mess set the Web on fire.
People took their mobile devices in droves hitting the more popular destinations for real-time news such as Yahoo and Google, mobile Websites for banks and stock brokers and even Twitter, which eventually faltered under the weight as well.
This is a perfect example of how the mobile Web bridges the gap between questions and answers using immediate access to information whenever and wherever it’s needed.
