The 2010 U.S. market event in which stocks plunged rapidly and then partly recovered within minutes was the Flash Crash.
It occurred on May 6, 2010, during a period of already nervous trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly lost almost 1,000 points, roughly 9%, before recovering much of the decline. Some individual securities experienced extraordinarily low or high transactions during the turmoil.
Investigations linked the episode to interactions among automated trading systems, market liquidity, and a large sell order in E-mini S&P 500 futures. Regulators later introduced measures such as circuit breakers and controls intended to reduce the effect of sudden, disorderly moves.
The Flash Crash was not a conventional multi-year market collapse like 1929 or 2008. Its defining feature was speed: the most dramatic movement happened within minutes, exposing how electronic markets could amplify pressure across trading venues.