The sharpest plunge of the 2010 Flash Crash lasted about 36 minutes before much of the U.S. equity market recovered.
On 6 May 2010, major US stock indexes suddenly dropped and then rebounded. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly lost nearly 1,000 points, an extraordinary intraday move. Some individual securities traded at implausibly low or high prices before normal trading returned.
Investigations by US regulators concluded that a large automated sell order in an already stressed market interacted with high-frequency trading and other automated strategies. Liquidity temporarily evaporated as systems reduced or withdrew displayed orders. The crash was therefore a rapid market-structure event rather than a conventional multi-month economic collapse.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission later introduced or supported safeguards, including circuit breakers and clearer rules for clearly erroneous trades. The episode is often confused with the 1987 crash because both involved automated trading concerns, but the 2010 event lasted minutes rather than becoming a lasting bear market.