Given the types of transactions Knight was involved in, it's unlikely they had physical access as the servers would be in lower Manhattan to keep latency down.

Given the types of transactions Knight was involved in, it's unlikely they had physical access as the servers would be in lower Manhattan to keep latency down. Couple that with the lack of any established procedures to kill their systems, and it's one hell of a nightmare. If the idea of just pulling the plug even came to them, I can't imagine how well that phone call would be received by the datacenter techs even if they believed it wasn't a hoax. And that's assuming that pulling the plug wouldn't cause other problems. But really, the 45 minutes probably flew by faster than you or I could really imagine. You're in a crisis situation, you tell yourself you just need another five minutes to fix something. Five becomes ten, becomes twenty, and before you know it, your company is looking at a $400M nightmare.