The extreme US market plunge on May 6, 2010, which lasted about 36 minutes, is called the 2010 Flash Crash.
During the afternoon of May 6, major US stock indexes fell rapidly before recovering much of the loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly dropped nearly 1,000 points, an unusually large move for such a short period. Some individual securities temporarily traded at absurdly low or high prices.
Investigations linked the event to interactions among high-frequency trading, automated selling, and stressed market conditions. A 2014 report by US regulators concluded that a large sell order in E-mini S&P 500 futures helped initiate the decline, while algorithmic trading amplified it. The episode was not a conventional multi-month bear market. It led exchanges and regulators to strengthen circuit breakers, market-wide safeguards, and procedures for reviewing clearly erroneous trades.