CrowdStrike shares drop 20 percent following microsoft outage

Paris: Shares of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike plummeted by approximately 20 percent in early trading on Wall Street on Friday, following speculation linking the company to a widespread IT disruption impacting businesses and airports globally.

Oleg Gorokhovsky, founder of Ukrainian online bank Monobank, attributed the outage to a clash between CrowdStrike's antivirus software and the Windows operating system of Microsoft, a major US tech company whose shares also dipped by about three percent before market opening.

Microsoft users worldwide, including banks and airlines, reported widespread outages on Friday, hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.

The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines, including American Airlines and Delta. News outlets in Australia reported that airlines, telecommunications providers and banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Some New Zealand banks said they were also offline.

Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.” The company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.

Agencies