TLDR: Stuff happens.
Various news outlets are abuzz about the United Airlines and New York Stock Exchange technical glitches today. They happened within hours of each other, so it is only natural that someone somewhere would wonder whether or not they were hacked.
Well, the short answer is: Stuff just plain happens, and in the tech world that is perhaps even more common than it is in nature.
There really is no evidence that either was due to hacking. Now, that does not prove it wasn’t, but it makes suggestions that they were caused by hackers very suspect, to say the least.
Seriously do your computers, TVs and smartphones at home and at work always function properly? Of course not. The fact that these outages occurred within hours of each other is most likely just a coincidence. Actually, it is less than that. How many systems crashed at the same time all over the world? The only difference was that they were not news-worthy sites.
We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and especially so when there is no evidence. In fact, United took great pains to point out a dysfunctional router as the cause of their problems.
Not every computer problem is the result of hacking.