Some London Stock Exchange services suffered disruptions on Friday amid a global IT outage that affected companies around the world. The LSE said securities trading was unaffected by the outage, but its regulatory news service was not working on Friday morning. A spokesperson said, “We are currently experiencing a third-party technical issue which is impacting some of our services. There is no impact to securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible and will continue to provide updates to our customers.”Meanwhile, payments giant Visa said it was unaffected by the outage, meaning payment processing on its systems is continuing as normal. A spokesperson for Visa said, “There is no indication of any impact on Visa’s ability to process payments from this issue. Our systems are operating normally. “We are aware of reports of people being unable to make payments and are working with our financial institution clients to understand any impact on their services to cardholders and merchants. London markets dropped in value after the news of the IT failure, which caused global issues for banks, supermarkets, airlines and other major institutions.
The FTSE 100 fell 0.8 per cent in early trading as investors were spooked by the outage, which could potentially hit companies’ bottom lines if it went on too long. Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said, “Countless industries, from airlines and trains to banks and media, face disruption to earnings if they cannot do their job. Workers cannot get from A to B and that will have a knock-on effect for industries across the board if staff aren’t there to perform important functions or systems are offline. The severity of the problem boils down to how long it lasts.” Mr Coatsworth added, “A few hours’ disruption is unhelpful but not a catastrophe. Furthermore, prolonged disruption is another matter, potentially causing damage to companies and economies. 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.” (dpa/NAN)
