OFA-03 : Knight Capital
A documented operational failure at Knight Capital, analyzed for the lessons it holds for mid-market operations leaders.
Section 01 : Overview
Company - Knight Capital Group (Knight Capital Americas LLC)
Time Period - August 2012
Operational Failure -
A manual software deployment to seven of eight production servers, combined with deprecated trading code left in the production system and no documented, tested halt protocol, sent a live Tier 1 trading engine into an uncontrolled execution state with no functional mechanism to stop it.
It caused Knight Capital to accumulate approximately $7 billion in unwanted equity positions in approximately 45 minutes, producing a $440 million loss that ended the company.
Impacted Dimensions -
- Dimension D01 - Process Documentation Coverage
- Dimension D06 - Technology Coherence
- Dimension D07 - Decision Rights Clarity
