The 2010 Flash Crash saw U.S. stock indexes briefly lose and regain hundreds of points within minutes.
On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 1,000 points, or nearly 9 percent, before recovering much of the loss. Many individual securities experienced extreme, temporary price movements, including trades at fractions of a cent or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Investigations by U.S. regulators concluded that a large automated order, combined with high-frequency trading and strained market liquidity, helped intensify the plunge. A later federal case identified trader Navinder Singh Sarao as contributing through spoofing activity, although the event had multiple interacting causes.
The crash prompted new market safeguards, including circuit breakers and rules for handling clearly erroneous trades. It differs from a conventional crash because much of the decline reversed within the same trading session.