The London Stock Exchange (LSE) is one of many organisations to be affected by the global outage that has been attributed to a Windows update.

Cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, has blamed an issue with one of its updates for Windows, saying that the problem has been "identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed".

As a result, the IT problem has disrupted transport, healthcare, businesses and other sector around the globe.

The stock exchange said in a service announcement to clients that the company was experiencing a "third-party global technical issue" that was impacting some services, although securities trading on the LSE was not affected.

The outage also meant that company updates were not being published to markets through its regulatory news services, although this now appears to have been rectified.

Investment analyst at AJ Bell, Dan Coatsworth, 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."

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