On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) settled with the NASDAQ stock exchange for a cool $10 million. The move comes after last year’s bungled initial public offering (IPO) of Facebook stock.

The SEC said in a statement that this amounted to the “largest ever penalty against an exchange.” However, this represents a relatively small amount to the exchange’s parent company, the NASDAQ OMX Group. That company's market capitalization is more than $5.2 billion, and the company generated a profit of $352 million in 2012.

In March 2013, NASDAQ also paid $62 million as a result of the Facebook IPO. That money went to investors who lost an estimated $500 million as a result of the delay in the stock’s trading. According to the SEC, the new NASDAQ settlement is the result of “securities laws violations resulting from its poor systems and decision-making during the initial public offering and secondary market trading of Facebook shares.”

So what happened? Essentially, when the market was flooded with orders, NASDAQ took a few extra milliseconds to process the orders than it normally does. Given that we live in a world of high-frequency trading, that’s nearly an eternity.

As the SEC wrote in its order (PDF):