The 2010 Flash Crash took about 36 minutes for the Dow Jones to lose and regain hundreds of points.
On May 6, 2010, major U.S. stock indexes suddenly plunged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling nearly 1,000 points before recovering much of the loss. The dramatic movement occurred during an otherwise unsettled trading session.
Investigations found that automated trading played a major role. A large sell order in E-mini S&P 500 futures interacted with high-frequency trading and reduced market liquidity, causing prices and trading activity to move extraordinarily quickly.
The event highlighted how modern electronic markets can behave differently from traditional human-paced trading. Regulators later introduced safeguards, including circuit breakers and rules for handling clearly erroneous trades. The crash was intraday; it was not a conventional multi-day bear market like 1929 or 2008.