In light of today’s SpaceX IPO, a story from inside Jane Street on the day of the 2012 Facebook IPO:

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For weeks leading up to the May 18, 2012 IPO of Facebook, the entirety of Jane Street’s trading and tech teams had been preparing for a record trading day. Increased volumes, volatility, and dislocations were expected across equities stat arb, domestic ETFs, and index futures.

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At the time, most of Jane Street’s US equities market data infrastructure ran through a third-party vendor’s middleware solution.

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The market data product was essentially a box of FPGAs with firmware that could stream in raw data packets from exchanges like Nasdaq and convert them into normalized structs to be broadcast on our internal InfiniBand network.

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It’s late morning of the Facebook IPO. Interest in the book was so enormous that the cross was delayed many hours. The entire trading floor was waiting in anticipation until, suddenly, all of Jane Street’s US equities market data went down.

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