(News Bulletin 247) – The Paris index lost 0.69% on Friday evening, while a computer failure apparently linked to the cybersecurity group Crowdstrike affected various parts of the global economy. The CAC 40 fell 2.46% over the whole week marked by several profit warnings.

A difficult end to the week on the Paris Stock Exchange. The CAC 40 closed down 0.69% at 7,534.52 points this Friday, bringing its weekly losses to 2.46%.

In the absence of major statistics, the session was mainly animated by a global computer failure that disrupted many sectors of the economy, particularly the airline sector, with many airports affected and airlines no longer able to check in passengers on their computers. KLM, a subsidiary of Air France-KLM, was notably forced to suspend a large part of its operations. Air France-KLM shares ended down 2%.

The global outage was identified and is believed to be due to an incident in an update of computer tools from Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company, which affected Windows users. The company said it had identified the problem and deployed a patch.

On Wall Street, Microsoft limited its decline to 0.7% and Crowdstrike only lost 9.5%, after having plunged by almost 15% in early trading.

The outage affected some stock exchanges, including London, where real-time news reporting was disrupted. This was not the case for the Paris Stock Exchange, with its operator Euronext indicating on its website that all its systems were operating normally.

Punishments in cascade

On the value side, several groups were punished after delivering disappointing publications. This is the case of Ubisoft which dropped 14% after giving the market lower than expected outlooks for its second quarter.

But the biggest decline in the SBF 120 index was Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which fell 16.3% after lowering its 2024 targets.

Same scenario and same punishment for Sopra Steria which returned 7.9%, after having reduced its organic growth target for 2024.

On other markets, the euro is down 0.1% at $1.0887. Oil is consolidating, under pressure after the degraded economic data coming from China. The September contract on North Sea Brent is down 1.3% at $83.98 a barrel, while the August contract on WTI listed in New York is up 1.6% at $79.98 a barrel.