Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange are currently in early talks over what would be an unprecedented partnership after the two leading US stock markets experienced recent halts in trading due to tech problems, The Wall Street Journal reports. The rival exchanges are currently considering a system that would allow each company to run a backup steam of stock-pricing data from the other in the event of an outage, the Journal says. Such an agreement would allow trading to continue as the affected company fixes whatever tech issue it's having at the time, thanks to help from the competing exchange.

The most notable tech outage — and the exact sort of scenario that regulators are trying to eliminate — came on August 22nd when a software connection problem stopped Nasdaq pricing data from being sent out and caused trading to shut down for three hours. In response, the NYSE temporarily halted trading as well. Last week, a problem stemming from a software update to the NYSE's data feeds caused a nearly 10-minute shutdown of the entire US options market.