Shares in Lloyds Banking Group PLC (LSE:LLOY), Barclays PLC (LSE:BARC), NatWest Group PLC (LSE:NWG) and HSBC Holdings PLC (LSE:HSBA) all traded lower in Friday’s early deals amidst uncertainty over the potential disruptions caused by a global IT outage.
A cloud services outage overnight caused chaos in the US. No sooner was this resolved than massive IT problems hit Australia, which appear to have spread to Europe.
In the UK this morning, viewers expecting to tune into Sky News at 6 am were greeted with a static message apologising for a 'disruption' to the service.
The London Stock Exchange’s regulatory news service (RNS) is down, though trading on the LSE is continuing.
A number of stock trading apps and platforms are also impacted.
Amidst the uncertainty, NatWest and HSBC shares were down 1.16% and 1% to 332.4p and 657.2p respectively, whilst Barclays traded down 0.8% to 226.75p and Lloyds was off by 0.5% down to 58.96p.
Downdetector.co.uk indicates that Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays, HSBC, Nationwide, Halifax, Santander, Visa and Mastercard services are currently impacted by the IT problems.