Wall Street closes sharply lower as AI cash burn fears spark tech selloff
All three major US stock indexes slumped on Friday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq suffering the steepest loss.
The tech rout was sparked by disappointing quarterly results from Intel and Amazon released late on Thursday.
Chip stocks veered sharply lower, dragging the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index to a monthly loss.
All three main equity indexes closed lower on the week. The S+P 500 and the Nasdaq logged monthly losses, while the Dow exited October with a gain.
According to preliminary data, the S+P 500 lost 139.30 points, or 1.80%, to end at 7,580.21 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 747.73 points, or 2.84%, to 25,440.68. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 571.98 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770.58.
Third-quarter earnings season has passed the halfway mark, with 299 companies in the S+P 500 having reported. Of those, 82% have beaten consensus expectations, according to LSEG data.
Analysts now expect third-quarter S+P 500 earnings growth of 31.6%, year-on-year, per LSEG.
Oil supermajors Exxon Mobil and Chevron both beat quarterly profit expectations, benefiting from soaring profit margins as a result of energy supply disruptions arising from the US-Israeli war with Iran and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Starbucks dipped after the coffee chain forecast an annual revenue decline due to its divestiture of its Chinese business.
Cryptocurrency-related firms Coinbase, Strategy, and Robinhood fell in the wake of reports that hackers stole $6.3bn from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.
Closing summary
US stocks tumbled on Friday, with the Nasdaq suffering its largest one-day percentage drop since 5 June. It followed disappointing quarterly results from Intel and Amazon, which amplified growing worries surrounding AI-related companies’ massive spending on the nascent technology. Cryptocurrency-related firms Coinbase, Strategy , and Robinhood fell in the wake of reports that hackers stole $6.3bn from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.
All three major US stock indexes slumped, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq suffering the steepest loss. According to preliminary data, the S+P 500 lost 139.30 points, or 1.80%, to end at 7,580.21 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 747.73 points, or 2.84%, to 25,440.68. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 571.98 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770.58.
Experts identified North Korea as the likely culprit behind the biggest heist in history, and have said the hack was probably carried out by TraderTraitor, an elite north Korean hacking unit. North Korea has a history of crypto hacking, which is estimated to generate half of the country’s foreign currency income, generating revenues for its military, including its nuclear weapons programme.
An initial investigation suggested the breach may have started with a hacked laptop belonging to one of Binance’s engineers, which let an attacker gain access to one of its systems and make unauthorised withdrawals, Binance said. The company added later that there had been “additional points of breach” in a sophisticated attack. Binance said it would cover all customer losses as it froze $3bn of the affected assets.
The FBI said it is “aware of the incident and is engaged with relevant public and private partners to understand the scope of the activity, evaluate potential impacts, and coordinate appropriate investigative steps”. The UK’s financial watchdogs are also monitoring for any potential fallout from the heist.
Wall Street closes sharply lower as AI cash burn fears spark tech selloff
All three major US stock indexes slumped on Friday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq suffering the steepest loss.
The tech rout was sparked by disappointing quarterly results from Intel and Amazon released late on Thursday.
Chip stocks veered sharply lower, dragging the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index to a monthly loss.
All three main equity indexes closed lower on the week. The S+P 500 and the Nasdaq logged monthly losses, while the Dow exited October with a gain.
According to preliminary data, the S+P 500 lost 139.30 points, or 1.80%, to end at 7,580.21 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 747.73 points, or 2.84%, to 25,440.68. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 571.98 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770.58.
Third-quarter earnings season has passed the halfway mark, with 299 companies in the S+P 500 having reported. Of those, 82% have beaten consensus expectations, according to LSEG data.
Analysts now expect third-quarter S+P 500 earnings growth of 31.6%, year-on-year, per LSEG.
Oil supermajors Exxon Mobil and Chevron both beat quarterly profit expectations, benefiting from soaring profit margins as a result of energy supply disruptions arising from the US-Israeli war with Iran and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Starbucks dipped after the coffee chain forecast an annual revenue decline due to its divestiture of its Chinese business.
Cryptocurrency-related firms Coinbase, Strategy, and Robinhood fell in the wake of reports that hackers stole $6.3bn from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.
Binance has no cyber insurance and will fund customer reimbursements through company reserves after hackers stole $6.3bn in the world’s largest cryptocurrency heist, Reuters is reporting, citing a source close to the exchange.
Binance has said the attack began with a compromised employee laptop and involved multiple breach points. It found no evidence of private-key leakage and said roughly $3bn of affected assets had been frozen.
The exchange holds directors’ and officers’ (D+O) liability insurance, Reuters’s source said, describing crypto cyber insurance as “virtually impossible” for crypto companies to obtain.
The source also said Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) had no external insurance or reinsurance backing.
D+O cover could respond to claims against executives alleging failings in their oversight, rather than replace stolen assets.
Analysis: How crypto hacking funds isolated North Korea’s nuclear programme
Defence and security editor
North Korea plays by its own rules. The isolated, secretive and autocratic country is largely cut off from the world’s economic system – but when it comes to generating foreign earnings it relies on some of the world’s most sophisticated hacking.
Experts, such as TRM Labs, quickly attributed the extraordinary $6.3bn Binance cryptocurrency theft to TraderTraitor, an elite North Korean hacking unit that has also been known as the Lazarus Group. Though the link may not be proven yet, the pattern of behaviour is familiar.
North Korea has a history of cryptocurrency theft dating back to 2017, focusing on the sector’s relatively lax security controls as a way of stealing money and generating revenues for its military, including its nuclear weapons programme.
Kim Jong-un, its dictatorial ruler, controls a stockpile of about 50 nuclear warheads, and has been supplying troops and weapons to help Russia in its war in Ukraine. But North Korea is also extremely poor: 40% of the population are undernourished according to the UN and nearly one in five of its children are stunted.
A UN panel of experts, reporting to the security council, said in the spring of 2024 that it was reviewing “58 suspected cyber-attacks” by North Korea “on cryptocurrency-related companies between 2017 and 2023” worth $3bn.
The panel said the cash was estimated to generate half of North Korea’s foreign currency income. One unnamed country went further with its estimate: the stolen billions fund “40% of the weapons of mass destruction programmes”.
The suspected crypto hacks amounted to as many as 17 in 2023 alone: thefts valued at $750m, and disturbingly, the sums involved are only increasing. The world’s largest previous crypto hack took place in February 2025, when $1.5bn was stolen from the Bybit exchange – the work, the FBI said, of TraderTraitor.
Ciaran Martin, a former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, argues that North Korea appears to have targeted crypto because traditional banks have developed sophisticated defences that the fast-growing and lightly regulated sector has yet to match. He said:
The irony is that the internet in North Korea is severely restricted, with access denied to the general population. Maths and science are pushed at school, however, and at university some of the best students are recruited into hacker groups, such as Lazarus, operating under the auspices of the country’s Reconnaissance General Bureau spy agency.
Read Dan’s full analysis here:
The $6.3bn Binance hack could mark an “inflection point” for digital asset insurance buying, with firms needing to look beyond large specie limits and examine the breadth of their protection, Relm CEO Joseph Ziolkowski told Reuters.
Exchanges and custodians had historically prioritised relatively inexpensive specie cover, he said, describing an approach of “form over function”. More than $1bn of specie limits was available globally, with less available for cyber cover including digital asset theft.
Ziolkowski described specie as largely protecting private keys. But a malicious intrusion elsewhere in a transaction approval process could enable theft while those keys remained intact.
Binance has said it found no evidence of private-key leakage and identified multiple breach points.
Cyber policies could respond to such intrusions where their wording expressly included digital asset theft, Ziolkowski said. He argued buyers should examine protection across their operations and transaction signing arrangements.
Even holding cyber insurance would not establish that a particular loss was covered, Ed Lewis, global lead for cyber and technology risks at RPC, told the news agency.
“A cyberattack tells you how the trouble started. It does not tell you which policy pays for the missing money,” he said.
A precautionary suspension of withdrawals might not satisfy the policy trigger for business interruption cover, Lewis said. Stolen assets, response costs, lost income and customer claims each required analysis against the facts and wording.
Binance has pledged to meet customer losses through its SAFU reserve and company resources, announcing more than $6.34bn of company funds separate from roughly $3bn of frozen assets.
Lewis said frozen assets had not necessarily been returned, while customer reimbursement did not establish that an insurer was paying. “A record theft does not automatically become a record insurance loss,” he said.
Tech stocks sell-off deepens, dragging Wall Street toward worst day since June
A sell-off for tech stocks is getting worse Friday on worries that Wall Street’s frenzy around AI sent prices too high, the Associated Press reported.
The S+P 500 dropped 1.9% and was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the month. The Nasdaq composite was likewise heading toward its worst day since June, as the weakness for technology stocks dragged it down 3.1%, as of 1:20 pm ET. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 511 points, or 1%.
The U.S. stock market remains only 3.1% below its record, which has boosted the value of workers’ 401(k) accounts, but the shakiness for stocks in the AI industry is coming just days before Tuesday’s upcoming US elections. Worries about AI in general have already become a general and bipartisan concern for voters, and Donald Trump has historically used the stock market’s performance as a measure of his own personal success.
In the cryptocurrency industry, meanwhile, stocks tumbled following a hack of Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange. The price of bitcoin fell toward $77,000 from more than $86,000 earlier this month, and a US-based blockchain intelligence firm said a North Korean unit was likely behind the attack that impacted more than $6 billion worth of crypto at Binance.
Explainer: How big a deal is the $6.3bn Binance heist?
By Dan Milmo and Kalyeena Makortoff
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a $6.3bn heist that, according to experts, is likely to be the work of North Korea.
This is not the first time a crypto market has been targeted by hackers, and the rogue state has a track record of this type of theft. Here we answer some key questions about what’s happened:
Just how big a deal is this?
It could be the biggest heist of any kind in history, according to Elliptic, a consultancy specialising in crypto-related crime. The incident, which took place late on Thursday, is more than four times bigger than the previous largest crypto hack, the $1.5bn one targeting the Bybit exchange last year. Elliptic says there does not appear to be anything comparable in the pre-crypto era.
How was Binance hacked?
It does not appear that private keys were hacked. Instead, a Binance engineer’s laptop was infiltrated, which in turn allowed the attackers to drain “hot” wallets. Binance later added that there were “additional points of breach” in its systems as well as the laptop.
Do we know who did it?
This attack has been attributed to a North Korean hacking unit called TraderTraitor, a name assigned to it by the US government. The communist state, short of cash and hamstrung by sanctions, has a strong track record of crypto hacking. TraderTraitor emerged from Lazarus, a group working from North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, a military intelligence agency.
Read more questions answered here:
Stocks have tumbled following the hack on the world’s biggest crypto exchange.
The price of bitcoin fell toward $77,000 from more than $86,000 earlier this month, and a US-based blockchain intelligence firm said a North Korean unit was likely behind the attack that impacted more than $6bn worth of crypto at Binance.
Coinbase Global fell 12.7% even though it reported stronger results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Strategy, which says it owns about 4% of the total supply of bitcoin, fell 6%, AP reported.
It also reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, while saying its chief financial officer will resign next week for personal reasons.
In the US, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Michael Selig told reporters that “we have the ability to trace all this in the blockchain”.
Speaking to CNBC, Selig said it was “very concerning” that there had been “several cyber incidents involving crypto” and the CFTC has regulations in place to prevent this sort of attack.
He added that he wants to see a “federal option” so that people will register with the CFTC.
Summary: the day so far
Hackers have stolen $6.3bn from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, in what could be the largest theft ever.
The attack saw more than $6bn of crypto assets taken from Binance’s own ‘hot wallet’, apparently after a laptop belonging to one of Binance’s development and operations engineers was compromised.
Binance has committed to cover losses from its company funds, and says it is working with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace, freeze and recover additional funds.
The FBI have said it is:
The UK’s financial watchdogs are also monitoring for any potential fallout from the Binance heist.
Co-CEO Richard Teng has said this afternoon that the attacker used a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went.
Teng also said Binance was conducting a full security review, and pledged:
Security experts said the hack was probably carried out by TraderTraitor, an elite north Korean hacking unit.
Chainalysis said the hackers appeared to be using “never-seen-before laundering patterns” to avoid the stolen funds being frozen, by switching stablecoins into non-freezable assets such as ethereum.
Crypto assets have dropped in value since news of the hack broke last night.
Here’s the damage over the last 24 hours, from
Bitcoin: down 5.3% at $77,503.39
Ethereum: down 6% at $2,216.25
BNB: down 6.5% at $699.13
Solana: down 7.7% at $94.57
