(Kitco News) - Gold’s safe-haven allure in a world fraught with geopolitical uncertainty has been a key driver for prices in the last couple of years; however, the precious metal continues to see solid selling pressure as the world recovers from the biggest cyber event on record.
In the early hours of Friday, a massive global technology outage shut down airlines, medical services, TV broadcasts, banks, and other businesses and services around the world.
Some states reported outages in 911 emergency services overnight as call centers were impacted by the outage. Britain’s National Health Service was crippled Friday morning as hospitals were unable to access their computer systems.
According to reports, the global outage was caused by a glitch in a software update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by businesses around the world to protect against hackers and outside breaches.
A problem in the code caused computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system to crash. However, systems are slowly starting to get back online as North Americans on the East Coast start their daily commute.
As of 5 a.m. EDT, American Airlines said it was able to re-establish its operations.
Some analysts have said that this is the worst cyber event since 2017 when older Microsoft Windows operating systems were shut down by the WannaCry ransomware. The attack was estimated to have affected computer systems in 150 countries.
However, this latest event was not the result of a cyber attack.
The gold market is not seeing much reaction to the global computer outage as prices continue to see solid profit-taking after hitting an all-time high earlier in the week.
Spot gold prices are currently testing key support around $2,400 an ounce, down 1.42% on the day.
