London Stock Exchange Hit by Global IT Outage

The London Stock Exchange was hit by a massive IT outage on Friday, causing global chaos.

Companies were unable to post updates to the LSE’s Regulatory News Service (RNS) this morning, while Reuters reported that the LSE Group’s Workspace news and data platform was experiencing an outage.

A statement on the LSE Group website said the news service was “experiencing a technical issue with an external party which is preventing news from being published.”

RNS services were finally restored later that morning, but as of 10:36 a.m. there was still a huge backlog of statements being published.

Industries ranging from airlines to banks, hospitals, supermarkets and television stations across multiple countries are facing significant challenges in carrying out their regular operations following the disruption.

British Airways, Ryanair and Wizz Air all warned their passengers of delays, while the UK’s major airports, including Heathrow and Gatwick, admitted their check-in and boarding processes were affected.

In addition, supermarket chain Morrisons informed customers that its call centre was closed, bakery chain Gail’s could not accept card payments and Sky News was temporarily off air.

The IT outage is attributed to an update to the antivirus software at cybersecurity company Crowdstrike and to problems with Microsoft’s 365 applications and the Azure cloud computing platform.

George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, later wrote on X that the issue was not a security incident or cyberattack, but was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

He added: ‘The problem has been identified, isolated and a solution has been implemented.

“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide full and ongoing updates on our website.”

European markets reacted negatively to the IT disruption, with the FTSE 100 down 0.5 percent to 8,161.3, France’s CAC 40 index down 0.7 percent to 7,530.3 and Germany’s DAX down 0.6 percent to 18,241.9.

London Stock Exchange Group Shares were down 0.8 percent on Friday afternoon to £93.94, but have risen around 12 percent over the past year.

Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said: ‘The world grinding to a halt due to a global IT crisis shows the downside of technology. It’s clear that life doesn’t always get easier when you’re reliant on computers.’

He further noted: ‘The severity of the problem comes down to how long it lasts. A few hours of disruption is not helpful, but not a disaster.

‘Long-term disruption is a different story, as it has the potential to damage businesses and economies.’