TheStreet’s J.D. Durkin brings the latest business headlines from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as markets close for trading Friday, March 8.
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: I'm J.D. Durkin, reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks were in the red to close out today's session. The Dow closed down 68 points, the NASDAQ closed down just over one percent, and the S&P closed six-tenths of a percent lower.
Investors are reacting to an inconclusive February jobs report. On the one hand, the U.S. economy added more jobs than expected, but on the other hand, the unemployment rate increased for the first time in four months. The Federal Reserve will take this report into account when it makes its next decision on interest rates later in March.
In other news, the Federal Communications Commission has opened up a formal investigation into February’s nationwide AT&T outage. The disruption prevented millions of customers from making calls, sending text messages, using the internet, or accessing emergency services.
AT&T has already apologized for the outage and has offered credits to affected subscribers. But after the FCC announcement, the company released another statement saying, "The industry routinely cooperates with our key regulators in the aftermath of serious outages to evaluate how network resiliency and reliability can be improved. We are already working with the FCC on its review."
AT&T has said the outage was due to an internal issue, citing a technical error while working on network expansion, and downplayed the possibility of a cybersecurity threat. It’s still unclear exactly how many people were affected by the disruption in service.
That’ll do it for your daily briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I’m J.D. Durkin with TheStreet.
