CRWD & MSFT

Uh Oh Major airlines around planet Earth have grounded flights early on Friday morning, while banks in Australia and elsewhere, Sky News in the UK and the London Stock Exchange have all had contunuity issues. Additionally, large numbers of people have been having problems with Microsoft's (MSFT) 365 suite of apps and its "Azure" cloud computing platform. Cybersecurity leader CrowdStrike (CRWD) has told the media that at least some of these outages and crashes are related to problems with its Falcon Sensor and not some attack made by outsiders or hackers. Even some of the platforms and services that I rely upon to do my job every day are not working correctly. For its part, Microsoft has announced that Azure service has been at least partially restored, while it appears that CrowdStrike is still having some significant problems. Though, the opening bell in New York is still several hours away, I would expect the problem or these problems to impact equity performance at least in the early going. At this overnight hour, I see CrowdStrike shares trading 14% lower than where they closed on Thursday afternoon, and I see Microsoft shares down 2.5%. Yes, these are both Sarge names. I am long both. Notably, other cybersecurity stocks are trading higher at this hour. I don't know just how damaging this news is, and how badly CrowdStrike's reputation is damaged. Therefore, I cannot tell you if I plan to buy this dip as of yet. I can tell you that I plan to make no changes this morning to the size of my MSFT long. I am watching Zscaler (ZS), Palo Alto networks (PANW) and SentinelOne this morning as this news develops.