U.S. markets opened and stocks traded Friday without a hitch despite an outage that roiled operations at companies across multiple industries, from airlines to healthcare to government agencies worldwide.
The outage stemmed from an update by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike to Microsoft Windows hosts, Crowdstrike said on its website. “A fix has been deployed,” it said, noting “this is not a security incident or cyberattack.” Microsoft also said all its systems were “up and running.”
By the time New York trading opened, most companies were becoming operational again but still catching up. Crowdstrike shares were down almost 9% at $312.84 at 12:18 p.m. ET, but stocks of most other affected companies were only slightly lower because widespread economic impact is expected to be small. Microsoft shares were down less than 1% at $438.06.
“The global IT outages affecting Windows software are causing huge temporary disruption to certain sectors including travel and healthcare, but while things are still very uncertain, we do not anticipate a major macroeconomic or financial market impact at this stage,” said Jennifer McKeown, chief global economist at research firm Capital Economics, in a note.
Since the outage wasn’t due to “a cyber attack and has not affected all software by any stretch, the implications should be significantly smaller,” she said.
Crowdstrike shares tumble on outage
Crowdstrike shares slid after analysts predicted the company would have to pay to…
