Cause of Nasdaq flash freeze still a mystery

There's no smoking gun -- or squirrel -- in the mystery of Thursday's Nasdaq outage.

The Nasdaq, where tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple trade, ceased functioning for about three hours Thursday, and no official explanation has been offered. But there's plenty of finger-pointing and speculation about what crashed the exchange, which has been felled twice by squirrels.

Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld, in an interview on CNBC, said, "We're deeply disappointed with what happened yesterday. We aspire to perfection. We want to get to 100% up time."

He said Nasdaq's first priority was to get its systems back working, not to talk to the press. "It's not our job nor will it be to go on the press, to the press and the public while we focus on the issue."

Greifeld blamed outside issues for the outage, but didn't name them.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is close to releasing new rules on high-frequency trading, according to Bloomberg Business News. Those high-speed trading tactics have been a controversy for the exchange for some time, potentially overloading the system.

Until Nasdaq does come up with an explanation -- and a fix -- the exchange and the securities industry will continue to suffer in the public's eye. "It's a big black eye -- they can't do the most basic function they are required to do," says Chicago securities Attorney Andrew Stoltmann. "When Nasdaq was fined $10 million because of problems with the Facebook IPO, they claimed that there were new systems in place to prevent those glitches."