Technology History | Nasdaq MarketSite — The Cross That Ran Nineteen Minutes Behind

Facebook sold 421.2 million shares at $38 on 18 May 2012 and raised more than $16 billion, the largest technology offering the American market had priced up to that point. The bell that opened the day rang about 4,100 kilometres from this building. Nasdaq's own advisory that morning set out the arrangement: Zuckerberg would ring the opening bell remotely from the Menlo Park headquarters, at the end of an all-night hackathon, with the ceremony closed to the press. Zynga had done the same the previous December, so a remote bell was becoming a practice rather than a stunt. Trading was expected to begin around 11:00 a.m. It began at 11:30, and what went wrong is documented precisely because the SEC published its findings. A public offering opens with an auction called the cross, which gathers every buy and sell order and computes the single price at which the most shares change hands. Nasdaq's cross application recalculated each time a late order or cancellation arrived, and against Facebook's volume the recalculation never caught up with the book. When the cross was finally released at 11:30, it was working from a picture of the order book frozen at 11:11. Nineteen minutes stale, it omitted more than 38,000 marketable orders placed in the interval, about 8,000 of which were pushed into the market at 11:30 instead. Investors spent hours not knowing whether they owned the stock. The SEC also found that Nasdaq had taken on a short position in Facebook shares in an unauthorised error account, in breach of its own rules, which it then had to cover. The stock closed at $38.23, twenty-three cents above the offer price, and underwriters were widely reported to have bought to keep it from breaking below. A year later the SEC imposed a $10 million penalty, at that point the largest it had levied on an exchange, citing a design limitation compounded by a series of decisions taken after the problem appeared. Nasdaq separately set aside $62 million for member firms, against losses the Wall Street Journal put closer to $500 million. The MarketSite tower still wraps the base of 4 Times Square at Broadway and 43rd Street, seven storeys of screen announcing the day's listings to the pavement. The cover photograph shows it in May 2026, with roadworks underneath. Photo: Nielsoncaetanosalmeron, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons