The 2010 Flash Crash took about 36 minutes to erase and largely recover about $1 trillion in market value.
On May 6, 2010, U.S. markets experienced an extraordinarily rapid plunge. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 1,000 points, or about 9%, before recovering much of the decline. Many individual securities briefly traded at wildly different prices.
Investigations linked the event to a large automated sell order interacting with high-frequency trading and already fragile market conditions. The precise mechanics were complex, and later regulatory proceedings focused on trader Navinder Singh Sarao, whose spoofing activity was found to have contributed to the disorder.
The event led exchanges and regulators to improve monitoring, introduce or refine single-stock pauses, and develop market-wide circuit breakers. It showed that electronic liquidity could disappear quickly even without a conventional economic panic.