As the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
In the case of United Airlines, be prepared to adjust your threshold of expected incompetence dramatically upward; since their merger with Continental multiple years ago, system-wide outages have been an every-couple-of-months thing.
ZeroHedge was down for a bit as well. I thought maybe it was an AWS (or other cloud provider) issue causing all the problems, until I read about the NYSE issue.
Maybe there's a stock market hacker flying around on planes...kinda like in the movie Hackers. Of course, in that movie they had no trouble cuffing him without grounding the plane. :)
interesting question and i'm not familiar with the rumors. is it that the shanghai index crash is synthesized? not being completely fluent in the financial sector, how would this be achieved?
Financial markets can be manipulated provided you have the right keys. At this point in time, this is just a wild conspiracy theory and it's explained as retaliation for all the cyber attacks allegedly carried out by the Chinese govt or people affiliated with it.
There's plenty of reason to believe China was in a bubble long before these last couple of weeks, and if you don't like somebody and want to do them the maximum damage, you want to help inflate the bubble, not pop it. (Well, at least, if you have a rational view of how markets work.)
edit: based on everything that i've heard/read, the incidents are most likely not related. sorry for asking the question.