The 6 May 2010 U.S. market plunge was called the Flash Crash.
On that afternoon, major U.S. equity indexes dropped extremely rapidly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly fell about 1,000 points, nearly 9%, before recovering much of the loss within minutes. Some individual securities experienced extraordinary temporary price movements, including trades at fractions of a cent or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Investigations linked the episode to a combination of high-frequency trading, automated order systems, market fragmentation, and a large sell order in E-mini S&P 500 futures. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission concluded that automated trading amplified the initial selling and created a feedback loop.
The crash differed from traditional multi-day financial crises because the most extreme movements happened in minutes. Regulators later introduced or strengthened safeguards, including single-stock circuit breakers and market-wide trading pauses. It is also commonly called the “Flash Crash,” not the “Flash Crash of 1987.”