Stock market today: Wall Street slips as S&P 500 heads for its worst week since April
U.S. stocks are slipping, as businesses around the world scramble to contain the effects of a disruptive technology outage
NEW YORK — U.S. stocks are slipping on Friday, as businesses around the world scramble to contain the effects of a disruptive technology outage.
The S&P 500 was 0.4% lower in midday trading, a day after a widespread wipeout dragged down much of the market, and it's on track to close its worst week in months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 366 points, or 0.9%, as of 11:15 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% lower.
The relatively calm trading came as a major outage disrupted flights, banks and even doctors’ appointments around the world. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack and that it had deployed a fix. The company said the problem lay in a faulty update sent to computers running Microsoft Windows.
CrowdStrike’s stock immediately plunged more than 15% when the market opened for trading, but it then nearly halved that to a loss of 8.4%. Microsoft was down 0.4%.
Richard Stiennon, a cybersecurity industry analyst, called it a historic mistake by CrowdStrike, but he also said he did not think it revealed a bigger problem with the cybersecurity industry or with CrowdStrike as a company.
“We all realize you can fat finger something, mistype something, you know whatever — we don’t know the technical details yet of how it caused the bluescreen of death” for users, he said.
«The markets are going to forgive them, the customers are going to forgive them, and this will blow over.”
Long lines of frustrated fliers formed at airports around the world as the outage hit check-in procedures, which
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