CrowdStrike stock plunges 15% on global outage; rival cyber stocks head higher
Update (9:40am ET) : Adds movement at market open
A glitch in an update of CrowdStrike’s (NASDAQ:CRWD) cybersecurity platform Falcon Sensor helped rival cybersecurity firms gain ground on Friday.
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike (CRWD) share fell 15% at market open, while Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) was down 1%.
The glitch triggered a major outage globally for many Microsoft (MSFT) cloud services, although the tech giant said it resolved the issue overnight. CrowdStrike (CRWD) said it is rolling back the update.
The outage hit backend operations at multiple industry sectors, including airlines, banks, hospitals and broadcast media, across the world.
Rival cybersecurity companies have seen their shares move up in response to the events. Palo Alto Networks (PANW) was up as much as +5% premarket and 3% at market open, and SentinelOne (S) +8%.
Other stocks that saw some premarket movement, include Fortinet (FTNT) +3% premarket Zscaler (ZS) +2% premarket, Cloudflare (NET) +1% premarket, and Cisco Systems (CSCO) +0.25% premarket.
Stocks to watch: Check Point (CHKP) +0.65%, Rapid7 (RPD) +0.20%, Darktrace (OTCPK:DRKTF), Cyberark Software (CYBR) +0.11%, Okta (OKTA) 0.45%.