US pre-open: Futures lower amid global IT crash

Wall Street futures were in the red ahead of the bell on Friday following big losses for the Dow in the previous session.

As of 1215 BST, Dow Jones futures were down 0.13%, while S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures had the indices opening 0.03% and 0.06% softer, respectively.

The Dow closed 533.06 points lower on Thursday, reversing most of the previous session's gains.

In focus on Friday, a major outage involving Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike has led to systems crashing at businesses around the world, including airlines, banks and hospitals.

Microsoft said on Thursday it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the Central US region, which had caused the grounding and cancellation of several flights. By Friday the problems had spread to airports globally. Reports emerged on Friday morning that a software update from Crowdstrike was causing Windows devices to crash.

Low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines reported outages that affected operations with a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365 cited as the cause, while United, Delta and American Airlines issued a "global ground stop" on all of their flights.

Elsewhere, presidential candidate Donald Trump told the Republican National Convention that he will enact "massive tax cuts" if he were to win the election in November.

In the corporate space, American Express and Halliburton quarterly shares were set to be published on Friday.

No major data points were scheduled for release.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com