PARIS (Reuters) – The New York Stock Exchange opened slightly higher on Friday amid caution over recent record highs in indices and as a major computer outage affected several sectors worldwide.
In early trading, the Dow Jones index, which hit a record high of 41,376 points on Thursday, lost 209.91 points, or 0.52%, to 40,455.11 points. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500, which hit a record high on Tuesday, gained 0.05% to 5,547.71 points.
The Nasdaq Composite gained 0.09%, or 16.64 points, to 17,887.86.
A massive computer outage attributed to Microsoft and Crowdstrike forced many airlines to ground their planes on Friday, while rail transport, telecommunications companies, banks and media outlets were also affected.
However, the CEO of cybersecurity company Crowdstrike said on X that the outage appeared to be on the verge of being resolved.
On the stock market, in the first trading Crowdstrike fell by 11.39% and Microsoft lost 0.32%.
“The inconvenience caused by the loss of access to services for thousands of people reminds us of our reliance on big technologies like Microsoft to run our daily lives and businesses,” said Jake Moore, Security Advisor at ESET.
“Companies need to test their infrastructure and have multiple security features in place, regardless of their size,” he said.
This disruption comes after two busy sessions on Wall Street against a backdrop of quarterly results publications from companies where large American capitalizations must justify the valuations they have been given since the beginning of the year.
Nvidia and Amazon fell 0.83% and 0.09% respectively, while Micron Technology and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing each fell around 1.15%, in a context of distrust of technology stocks considered overvalued.
Netflix is up 1.63%. The streaming platform attracted 8 million subscribers in the second quarter, thanks in particular to the end of password sharing.
American Express fell 3.60% after reporting weaker-than-expected second-quarter revenue on Friday.
Travelers Companies fell 6.11% after its second-quarter results.
A sign of investor excitement, the fear index is trading at more than 16 points, its highest level since the end of April.
(Written by Claude Chendjou, edited by Kate Entringer)
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