World stocks fell on Friday after a global IT outage grounded airlines, hit banks and caused widespread disruption across a range of industries.
Services from airlines to banks were impacted by the problems, sparked by an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that affected Windows systems around the world, rattling investors and unsettling markets
A sell-off in technology shares and some downbeat earnings along with falling commodity-linked stocks ended a tumultuous week.
Dublin
The Irish index of shares was marginally lower on Friday, tracking losses across the continent as businesses recovered from the global outage.
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The Euronext Dublin appeared to have escaped the worst of the problems, saying the issue was not impacting trading.
Banking shares were mixed, with AIB rising almost 2 per cent and Bank of Ireland losing 0.64 per cent. Permanent TSB was up 3.1 per cent by the close of the session.
Food groups Kerry and Glanbia both declined, shedding 1.25 per cent and 1.14 per cent respectively.
Airline Ryanair, which was impacted by the tech outage that took its online check-in out of service and caused a small number of flight cancellations, was down 1.47 per cent by the end of the day.
Insulation specialist Kingspan was 1.8 per cent lower.
London
London stocks finished the week lower as investors assessed a fall in domestic retail sales in June, while commodity-linked stocks dropped, tracking declines in prices of copper, gold and other metals.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 index was down 0.6 per cent. The mid-cap FTSE 250 was off 0.8 per cent. Both indexes snapped two weeks of consecutive gains.
LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform, regulatory news service and currency spot and forward prices had been affected by the outage caused by a “third-party global technical issue”.
By midday in London most of those issues seemed to have been resolved. Securities trading on the London Stock Exchange was not affected.
Precious metal miners fell 0.8 per cent, with Fresnillo falling 1.4 per cent in sync with a decline in spot gold prices.
Aerospace and defence stocks were the only outliers with a 0.7 per cent gain amid the broader declines after senior executives from British defence firms, including BAE and Babcock, met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss the need to boost military support for his country in its conflict with Russia.
Europe
The pan-European STOXX 600 index closed 0.8 per cent lower, slipping to a more than two-week low and logging a weekly decline of more than 2 per cent, its biggest weekly fall so far this year.
Trading in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies and bonds was on its way back to business as usual after the tech outage hampered operations at financial services firms and banks from London to Singapore, although residual data problems remained.
Italy’s bourse said that its FTSE MIB index was again being updated regularly after its functioning was affected earlier by the global IT outage. It ended down 0.9 per cent.
Travel and leisure shares were among top decliners with a 2.1 per cent fall, driven by a 8.3 per cent fall in Sweden’s Evolution after missing second quarter top-line and earnings expectations.
Tech shares were down 1 per cent on the day and were the worst performing sector this week with a near 9 per cent tumble.
Among other stocks Sartorius was down 13.1 per cent after the pharmaceutical equipment supplier cut its full-year guidance.
Ubisoft dropped 14 per cent after the French video game-maker posted a smaller-than-expected rise in quarterly net bookings and forecast second-quarter bookings below analysts’ estimates.
New York
Tech stocks were mixed in the wake of the IT outage. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike fell 8.2 per cent after an update to one of its products appeared to trigger the outage, while Microsoft was down 0.3 per cent after the cloud disruption.
Nvidia lost around 1 per cent, while Apple and Alphabet stayed broadly positive.
US-listed shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing extended earlier losses to shed around 3.5 per cent on the day.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 337.37 points, or 0.84 per cent, to 40,327.65. The S&P 500 lost 17.55 points, or 0.30 per cent, to 5,527.04, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 56.06 points, or 0.32 per cent, to 17,813.99. – Additional reporting: Reuters
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