The halt comes after two tough sessions for Wall Street, as investors assessed second-quarter results and a move away from the mega-caps that have primarily driven the stock rally in 2024.
The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike plunges 9% after an update to one of its products appeared to trigger an outage affecting customers using the operating system Microsoft Windowscausing disruptions in various sectors.
As reported by Ambito, major U.S. airlines ordered flights to be halted citing communication problems, while the Euronext stock exchange and the London Stock Exchange Group’s Workspace news and data platform LSEG.L also faced problems. LSEG later said its data and services were back online.
Shares of the security firm moderated their fall, having lost almost 12% before the market opened. Microsoft, meanwhile, fell 0.7% to its lowest level in more than a month, on track for a four-day slide, driven by a sell-off in technology stocks.
“Any hint of bad news, because these (tech) stocks are so perfectly valued, is going to hurt these stocks. Both (CrowdStrike and Microsoft) are excellent companies and worth holding for the long term,” said Phil Blancato, CEO of Ladenburg Thalmann Asset Management.
The halt comes after two tough sessions for Wall Street, as investors weighed second-quarter results and a move away from the mega-caps that have largely driven the stock rally in 2024.
CrowdStrike: What the company said
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote Friday morning on X. “This is not a security incident or a cyberattack.”
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Meanwhile, Microsoft users around the world were dealing with the ‘Blue Screen of Death’, posting images of their frozen screens online as they were unable to access corporate laptops and computers. In an online statement, Microsoft said the issue was caused by an update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software.designed to protect against malware and ‘much more’.
Microsoft later said the “underlying cause of the issue” had been fixed, adding that several Microsoft 365 apps had been fully restored, including OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. But some apps and services were still experiencing residual impacts.
Source: Ambito
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