Global Stocks Lower Amid Global Cyber Outage
On Friday, global stock indexes were lower as investors were rattled by a global cyber outage.
The outage affected services from banks to airlines and unsettled markets further after a troubled week.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike dropped 8.2% after an update to one of its products seemed to cause the outage that affected customers using Microsoft Windows.
London Stock Exchange Group’s Workspace data and news platform as well as the Euronext exchange also faced problems. LSEG said later its services and data were back online.
Charles Schwab’s chief global investment strategist, Jeff Kleintop, said the outages were a reminder that services can also have supply chain disruptions too. Although this was not caused by a cyberattack, the outage was a stark reminder of how deeply integrated systems are.
Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, the Cboe Volatility Index, was at its highest level since May.
MSCI’s index of global stocks dropped 4.69 points, or 0.57%, to 812.76. The STOXX 600 pan-European index declined 0.76%.
The Nasdaq Composite lost 56.06 points, or 0.32%, to 17,813.99, the S&P 500 lost 17.55 points, or 0.30%, to 5,527.04 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 337.37 points, or 0.84%, to 40,327.65.
In the U.S., megacaps were mixed with Alphabet and Apple staying broadly positive, while Nvidia lost about 1%.