On Friday, a series of technological issues disrupted operations at airlines, banks, and the London Stock Exchange (LSE), creating a ripple effect of failures that extended from the United States to Asia. This followed Microsoft Corp.'s announcement of an outage affecting its online services, as reported by various media outlets.
The London Stock Exchange Group, responsible for running the London stock market, confirmed it was experiencing a global technical issue preventing the publication of news. Despite this, other services within the group, including the stock exchange itself, continued to operate normally.
Market Impact
Microsoft shares were trading at $440.37, reflecting a 0.71 per cent drop in pre-market trading.
In a service notification, the LSE stated, "The RNS news service is experiencing a third-party global technical fault that prevents news from being published on www.londonstockexchange.com. Technical staff are working to restore service."
Initial Issues in the US
According to media reports, the problems began in the United States late on Thursday, linked to a breakdown in Microsoft services such as Azure and Microsoft 365. Frontier Airlines, a subsidiary of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded its aircraft for more than two hours due to issues with Microsoft's online services. The airline lifted the suspension of departures and began restoring flights at 11 p.m. New York time.
Reuters reported that Microsoft acknowledged the outage began at 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, with some customers experiencing difficulties with various Azure services in the Central US region. Azure is a Cloud computing platform offering tools for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. Microsoft is investigating an issue impacting several Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Impact on Indian Financial Sector
Dalal Street traders were also affected by Microsoft's major service outage on Friday, with technical glitches reported at multiple brokerage firms.
Brokerage firms 5paisa and IIFL Securities informed their clients that their systems were impacted due to the Microsoft issue. 5paisa stated on X (formerly Twitter), "Due to a global outage with Crowdstrike/Microsoft, offering a cyber security solution, our systems are affected. Our team is working closely with both of them to restore our systems as soon as possible."
The technical issues highlight the interconnected nature of global services and the significant impact that outages in major tech companies can have across various sectors worldwide.