Stock futures were mixed Friday after the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 500 points and snapped a six-session winning streak, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.7%, extending declines after the index fell steeply on Wednesday.
A global IT outage also was rattling stock markets.
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U.S. stock futures were mixed Friday as a major technology outage disrupted everything from banks to airlines to stock exchanges.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 0.2%, while futures tracking the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were up 0.1% and 0.2%, respectively. All three indexes fell on Thursday, with the Dow down more than 530 points.
The information technology outage could affect trading and may be a particular drag on Microsoft and CrowdStrike, the two companies most involved in the glitch. The problems don’t appear to be a cyberattack. More generally, investors have become more cautious about tech stocks after former President Donald Trump, leading in the polls for the election in November, appeared to question the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan, a hub for semiconductors.
“Risk-off sentiment is spreading across financial markets, sparked by concerns about deepening trade wars between the U.S. and China,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown. “A major IT outage, which began in Australia and sent ripples round the world, affecting Windows on PCs across a raft of sectors is also unsettling.”
The rate on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury bond was at 4.205% early Friday. The yield on the 2-year note was at 4.484%.
