Sensex, Nifty crash on rout in global markets after Microsoft outage hits businesses

Closing Bell: The domestic stock market indices faced a massive decline in the last trading session of the week amid a global IT outage due to Microsoft Windows users facing a "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) error. Bombay Stock Exchange’s 30-share Sensitive Index (Sensex) fell 738.81 points or 0.91 per cent to 80,604.65, whereas the NSE’s Nifty 50 routed 269.95 points or 1.09 per cent to 24,530.90. 

Businesses ranging from stock markets, banks, aviation and healthcare came to a standstill globally after the Microsoft 365 outage sparked tech glitches. 

Among Sensex’s 30 stocks, only four ended in green and 26 settled lower than their opening price. Tata Steel fell as much as 5.44 per cent to hit an intraday low of 157.30, becoming the biggest laggard of the day. JSW Steel, Tata Motors, NTPC, UltraTech Cement, and Tech Mahindra were other leading shares that faced significant losses in today’s trading session. 

After reporting strong growth prospects in the first quarter earnings, Infosys became the top performer on Friday with close to 2 per cent gains on BSE. Despite strong positive momentum in IT stocks only HCLTech, LTTS and Mphasis Ltd ended on a positive note. Nifty IT, the broader IT index, faced a 0.22 per cent decline. 

The worst hit in today’s market rout was taken by Metals, Oil & Gas, Realty, and Auto stocks. Nifty’s metal index fell drastically by almost 4 per cent, dragged by Jindal Steel, National Mineral Development Corporation, Tata Steel, JSW Steel, Hindalco, and SAIL. 

Castrol Oil, Hindustan Petroleum, GAIL, BPCL, and ONGC dragged the Nifty Oil & Gas index down by around 3 per cent. The Nifty Realty index fell as much as 2.36 per cent whereas, the Auto index faced a 2.4 per cent decline. 

All the 13 major sectors logged losses on Friday. The broader, more domestically focussed small and mid-caps index fell about 2 per cent each.

Talking about today’s market crash, Parth Nyati, Founder, Tradingo said, “An Anti-virus Crowdstrike faced a technical glitch after an update that affected the Microsoft servers and PCs where this anti-virus was installed. This anti-virus is also installed on Microsoft servers provided by Azure as a part of their cloud infrastructure. Azure accounts for 25 per cent market share amongst cloud services. Hence a lot of large organizations, airlines, and stock exchanges globally that use Azure had technical glitches. The Crowdstrike team is currently working to resolve the issue.” 

“Strong sales pressure was noticed in many sectors, especially in the Auto, Metals, and Realty sectors. Although Indian VIX rose nearly 2 per cent, closing above 14.50 moreover, in the next 5-7 days there are some expectations to bring significant changes due to the upcoming budget for FY 24-25 which is scheduled next week for Tuesday, July 23, 2024,” said VLA Ambala, Co-Founder of Stock Market Today.