"N.Y.S.E.'s communications with the industry were proactive and helpful," a JPMorgan Chase executive wrote to clients the next day.  In its communication with the news media and the outside world, on the day of the failure, the exchange was hobbled by the departure, over the last two years, of its senior media officers. That left ICE to rely on a smaller number of relatively junior employees during the shutdown.  When members of the New York exchange's staff were heard on the phone after the problems first arose, they sounded as though they were struggling to identify and respond to the issues, according to two people involved in calls with the exchange.  "There is frankly a level of experience and expertise that isn't there," said a former N.Y.S.E. employee who dealt with the exchange last week on behalf of a new employer, and who was not authorized to speak on the record. "You deal with enough of these situations and you figure out how to recover from them."  Scott Visconti, who is now in charge of the New York exchange's technology operations, has been at the exchange since just 2012. He replaced people who had more experience with the exchange's complicated trading system, known as the Universal Trading Platform.  Read MoreNYSE: This is why we halted floor trading  The fate of the New York exchange — and all the related jobs in New York — was a hot topic when ICE announced that it was buying NYSE-Euronext in late 2012 for $8.2 billion. New York politicians sought assurances from the company that it would not shut down the showplace exchange.  Even within the world of stock trading, the New York exchange and its live trading floor have been viewed as an expensive relic vulnerable to closure. The ornate club rooms and expansive offices that ICE bought in New York were built in an earlier era, before electronic trading had eroded the fees that the exchanges collected. Since ICE acquired the stock exchange, stock trading fees have accounted for only about 5 percent of the broader company's revenue, according to data from Sandler O'Neill.  The chief executive of ICE, Jeffrey Sprecher, has said many times that he is committed to keeping open the trading floor and he promised to keep dual headquarters in New York and Atlanta. But he was clear from the first day that he was going to squeeze costs in the combined company.  "We really believe that we can operate this combined business with a lower cost, much lower cost base than the two of us have independently," Mr. Sprecher said on the day the deal was announced.  Mr. Sprecher quickly got rid of almost all of the top executives at the New York exchange. The deputy whom Mr. Sprecher installed in New York, a 39-year-old former college baseball player, Thomas Farley, quickly set out to renovate the exchange's main building on Wall Street to improve communication, to make room for more workers and eliminate the need for the building next door.  Mr. Farley has also led an effort to build a new basic trading system, known as Pillar, for the stock exchange. But for the time being, the exchange is still running on its old software. Former employees said they worried that ICE got rid of many of the senior staff who knew the intricacies of the old system before phasing it out.  Mr. Wallis said that organizations often made the mistake of putting resources into new software and not spending enough to maintain the existing infrastructure. "That's always a risk when you thin out your staff," he said.
Last week's glitch at the NYSE that prevented hours of trading draws attention to layoffs, The New York Times reports.