During the 2010 Flash Crash, by about how many Dow Jones points did the index briefly fall?

During the 2010 Flash Crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly fell by nearly 1,000 points.

On 6 May 2010, U.S. equity markets dropped rapidly before recovering much of the decline. The Dow fell about 998.5 points, or roughly 9%, within minutes. Some individual securities traded at extremely low prices, while others briefly showed unusually high prices.

Investigations found that automated trading, market conditions, and a large sell order interacted in a way that overwhelmed available liquidity. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission later described a complex chain of events rather than a single simple cause. Trader Navinder Singh Sarao was prosecuted in connection with spoofing, but the crash involved broader market mechanisms.

The episode led to new safeguards, including single-stock circuit breakers and market-wide limit-up-limit-down rules. It is different from a conventional crash driven by a long economic recession: the defining feature was its extreme speed and partial recovery.