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“There is chatter that cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike ran an update which didn’t work on Microsoft’s operating system and that caused systems to fall over. Given we don’t know the full details, it’s too early for investors to work out the financial or reputational impact to these businesses,” Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said.

At the time of writing (11:46 CET) shares in Microsoft were down 3.24% pre-market trading in the US, while shares in CrowdStrike declined 19.28%.

In Europe, stock markets continued to function as normal despite corporate news feeds and information terminals being impacted by the tech outage.

“Futures prices imply a small pullback when Wall Street opens later today, but so far investors have not shown any panic. Whether that remains the case as the day goes on is another matter,” Coatsworth also said.

Meanwhile, Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at Invest Conotoxia, said it seems that for the first time we are facing a real global blackout.

“The incident has made us realise how dependent we are on a single technology company and how serious the consequences of a failure of such an entity on this scale can be. It is a perfect example described by Nassim Taleb as a ‘black swan’. The disruption affected not only individual users, but especially large institutions such as banks (including central banks), stock exchanges, airports, paralysing operations during the peak holiday season and causing chaos in many other sectors.

“Warren Buffett once said that it can take years to create trust and only a day to lose it. Microsoft’s shares on the German stock exchange fell by more than 2%, while the stock of CrowdStrike, which confirmed that the problem concerned their Falcon Sensor software, fell by almost 14%. Although the failure was quickly identified and fixed, the shares of CrowdStrike’s competitors gained up to 6% in pre-session trading.”

Drozdz also noted that the decline in Microsoft’s shares and those of many other companies affected by the blackout is likely to have a negative impact on the quotations of the major US indices, as Microsoft, which is the second largest company in the world by capitalisation, has as much as 8.7% of the Nasdaq 100 index and 7% of the S&P 500 index.