FALCON POWERS – U.S. stocks continued their decline today, Saturday, as the chaos associated with a global technical glitch due to a software failure increased the uncertainty in the already turbulent market, while European stocks also declined.
This widespread global technical disruption led to the disruption of operations in many sectors, such as airlines, banking services, and healthcare, after a failure in the software of the cybersecurity company “CrowdStrike” caused a malfunction in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
The three main indices on Wall Street incurred losses, with the Dow Jones index being the most declined.
On a weekly basis, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices recorded their worst performance since last April, while the Dow Jones index gained.
The S&P 500 index fell by 0.71%
The Nasdaq Composite index lost 0.81%
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 0.93%
European stocks closed lower on Friday, with sell-offs in technology stocks and some disappointing earnings reports, as well as a decline in commodity-linked shares, concluding a turbulent week that ended with a global technical outage today. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index closed down 0.8%, its lowest level in more than two weeks, and recorded a weekly loss of more than 2%, the largest since the start of the current year.
The travel and leisure sub-index was among the biggest losers, declining by 2.1%.
Trading in oil, gas, energy, stocks, currencies, and bonds returned to normal after a global technical outage that disrupted operations at financial service companies and banks from London to Singapore.
Services in various fields, from airlines to healthcare, shipping, and finance, gradually resumed operations on Friday.
This global outage revealed the emerging vulnerabilities from the world’s shift to interconnected technology following the COVID-19 pandemic.
