LONDON, July 19 -- Amid a global tech outage causing chaos in multiple industries across the United Kingdom (UK), British stocks decreased on Friday, with the benchmark FTSE 100 Index down by 0.60 percent, or 49.17 points, to close at 8,155.72 points.

Transport, financial services, healthcare and businesses in the UK were seriously disrupted throughout the day, and CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant was at the heart of the global technical failure.

CrowdStrike identified a defect in its Falcon software update as the cause but said that the incident was not due to a security breach or cyberattack.

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted," the firm said in a statement. "The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

In the UK, travelers have complained about delays and cancellations at airports and railway stations, and long queues and crowded scenes have been reported on social media.

The UK's largest airport, Heathrow, said the airport is working to "minimize the impact of the global IT outage on passenger journeys" and advised passengers to check with their airlines for the latest flight information.

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which operates the London Stock Exchange, said earlier on Friday morning that its Regulatory News Service (RNS) was experiencing a global technical issue that was preventing news from being published. The service was restored later in the afternoon.

RNS is the LSEG's service for regulatory news announcements, processing about 350,000 announcements each year, and 75 percent of all price-sensitive news comes from the RNS.

The company noted that other services across the Group, including the London Stock Exchange continue to operate as normal.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) also made a statement on its X account, saying that the NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with a General Practitioner (GP) appointment and patient record system.

Pharmacy services, including prescription access from GPs and medicine deliveries, have also been affected, according to the National Pharmacy Association.

Other major European stocks also went down on Friday. The Paris CAC 40, a benchmark French stock market index, on Friday was down by 0.69 percent, or 52.03 points to 7,534.52, and the German benchmark DAX index fell by 1.00 percent, or 182.83 points to 18,171.93.

  - Xinhua