BTC Rebounds as Microsoft Outage Hits Worldwide

An outage occurred on Microsoft-based machines on Friday, leaving several sectors, such as aviation, railways and finance, dysfunctional or functional with limited capabilities. It happened when CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, released a new update that went wrong. No hackers were involved in the accident.

With this, BTC rose to over $67,000, starting the day at around $64,000, marking a 5.5% increase in 24 hours. At the same time, BlackRock’s spot BTC ETF, Ishares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), saw huge trading volumes. In the first hour of trading it recorded inflows of $340 million. Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) saw inflows of $143 million in the same period.

Among altcoins, SOL took the lead, growing 8.5% and surpassing the $170 mark, a price it had not seen since June. ETH underperformed compared to the gains recorded by SOL, rising only 3.3%. However, it managed to surpass $3,500 again.

The cryptocurrency market rose on Friday compared to the decline earlier in the week due to huge sell-offs in US technology stocks. However, the asset class collectively recovered as stock indices continued to lose value. The S&P 500 index fell 0.6% on the same day, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.8% and gold fell more than 2%.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts and figures noted that institutional crypto products gained great traction as Microsoft’s single point of failure disruption occurred and the traditional US market opened up.

Charles Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments, posted on X: “Market hours for IBIT open at 9:30 am ET. In a few minutes, Bitcoin skyrocketed from $64,000, now above $65,000. Did some institution just wake up and decide that Bitcoin is a safe haven, a decentralized store of value, while global technology and banking systems fail on Microsoft’s blue screen of death?