The 2010 Flash Crash was the event in which US stock prices plunged and rebounded within minutes.
On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 1,000 points, roughly 9 percent, in a very short period. Many individual securities experienced extreme price changes before recovering much of the loss.
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, helping accelerate the downward move. Regulators later charged trader Navinder Singh Sarao with contributing to the event through spoofing, although the episode had broader structural causes.
The crash was not a conventional recession-driven collapse. It exposed how quickly electronic markets could move when liquidity disappeared. US exchanges and regulators subsequently strengthened circuit breakers and coordinated procedures for handling extraordinary volatility.