The 2010 U.S. market event in which the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points intraday was the Flash Crash.
On May 6, 2010, major U.S. stock indexes fell rapidly before recovering much of the decline. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped about 1,000 points, approximately 9%, during the session. Some individual securities briefly traded at extremely low prices, while others showed unusually large moves.
Investigations linked the event to interactions among high-frequency trading, automated orders, market liquidity, and a large sell order in E-mini S&P 500 futures. The exact mechanics were complex, and the episode was not a conventional economic crash caused by a prolonged recession. U.S. regulators later introduced measures such as circuit breakers and single-stock trading pauses to reduce the risk of similar disorderly movements.