London Stock Exchange and Barclays’ services hit as markets drop on IT outage

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

London Stock Exchange updates were among the financial services suffering disruptions on Friday amid a global IT outage that has affected companies around the world.

The LSE said securities trading was unaffected by the outage, but its regulatory news service was not working on Friday morning.

A spokesperson said: “We are currently experiencing a third party technical issue which is impacting some of our services.

“There is no impact to securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible and will continue to provide updates to our customers.”

Elsewhere, a spokesperson for Barclays bank said its digital investing platform was also suffering disruptions.

They said: “All Barclays services are operating as normal at this time other than our digital investing platform Smart Investor, where customers are currently unable to manage their account in the app, Online Banking or over the phone.”

Other payments services, banks and financial institutions sought to reassure customers that their systems were running without disruption.

Link, which runs the UK’s network of ATM cash machines, said its network is “working normally but enhanced monitoring is in place as a precaution.”

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs is understood to be operating as normal in the UK.

Payments giant Visa said it was unaffected by the outage. A spokesperson said: “There is no indication of any impact on Visa’s ability to process payments from this issue.

“Our systems are operating normally.

“We are aware of reports of people being unable to make payments and are working with our financial institution clients to understand any impact on their services to cardholders and merchants.”

London markets dropped in value after news of the IT failure, which has caused issues around the world for banks, supermarkets, airlines and other major institutions.

The FTSE 100 fell 0.8% in early trading as investors were spooked by the outage potentially hitting companies’ bottom lines if it goes on too long.

Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said: “Countless industries, from airlines and trains to banks and media, face disruption to earnings if they cannot do their job.

“Workers cannot get from A to B and that will have a knock-on effect for industries across the board if staff aren’t there to perform important functions or systems are offline.

“The severity of the problem boils down to how long it lasts. A few hours’ disruption is unhelpful but not a catastrophe. Prolonged disruption is another matter, potentially causing damage to companies and economies.

“Stock markets continued to function as normal despite corporate news feeds and information terminals being impacted by the tech outage.

“Futures prices imply a small pullback when Wall Street opens later today, but so far investors have not shown any panic. Whether that remains the case as the day goes on is another matter.”