Shares in CrowdStrike and Microsoft were in the red on Friday after a global IT outage hit companies and industries worldwide.
ADVERTISEMENTAt the time of writing (16:04 CET) shares in Microsoft were down 0.53%, while CrowdStrike stock declined 9.39% in the US, reflecting cautious investor sentiment after an IT outage caused widespread chaos.
Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm with thousands of customers globally, admitted that a defective software update had caused the glitch, hitting airlines, banks, hospitals, media outlets, and businesses, bringing many to a halt.
“Given we don’t know the full details, it’s too early for investors to work out the financial or reputational impact to these businesses," Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said.
Meanwhile, Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at Invest Conotoxia, said it seems that for the first time we are facing a real global blackout.
"The incident has made us realise how dependent we are on a single technology company and how serious the consequences of a failure of such an entity on this scale can be. It is a perfect example described by Nassim Taleb as a ‘black swan’. The disruption affected not only individual users, but especially large institutions such as banks (including central banks), stock exchanges, airports, paralysing operations during the peak holiday season and causing chaos in many other sectors.
"Warren Buffett once said that it can take years to create trust and only a day to lose it....although the failure was quickly identified and fixed, the shares of CrowdStrike's competitors gained up to 6% in pre-session trading."
Drozdz also noted that the decline in Microsoft's shares and those of many other companies affected by the blackout is likely to have a negative impact on the quotations of the major US indices, as Microsoft, which is the second largest company in the world by capitalisation, has as much as 8.7% of the Nasdaq 100 index and 7% of the S&P 500 index.
