Top Stories This Morning: Binance Confirms $6 Billion Hack; Intel and Amazon Trigger Sell-Off

The scale of the cyberattack on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, totaled $6.3 billion. The plunge in Amazon and Intel shares following weak earnings reports has dragged down Asian tech companies, and futures for the U.S. Nasdaq-100 stock index are down 1.9%. Read about these and other topics in our roundup of key events as of the morning of October 30.

Binance has suspended deposits and withdrawals following a cyberattack that resulted in losses of approximately $6.3 billion. This may be the largest crypto theft in history, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, along with other market participants, have frozen $3 billion in stolen assets. However, according to the founder of Ballet Global, a company that manufactures hardware crypto wallets, the stolen bitcoins will likely never be recovered, Bloomberg reports. “Freezing assets is not the same as recovering them,” he noted, warning that there is a real chance of recovery only in the case of stablecoins. The exchange has promised to compensate users for all losses.

According to preliminary data, the attackers gained access to a DevOps engineer’s laptop and were able to carry out unauthorized transactions. TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence believe that the North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor is behind the attack.

Bitcoin fell more than 4% on Friday, dropping below the $78,000 mark. Ethereum lost 4.9%, and the BNB token fell 7.7%.

Amazon, a retailer and owner of cloud infrastructure for AI, reported higher-than-expected capital expenditures and, at the same time, a slowdown in e-commerce revenue growth. The company's stock fell 7% in after-hours trading on October 29.

Meanwhile, revenue for Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud division, rose 39% in the third quarter to $45.98 billion, exceeding analysts’ forecast of $45.29 billion, according to CNBC. This marked the fastest growth rate since the end of 2021. The division’s operating profit rose 55% to $17.77 billion, also exceeding market expectations. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy forecasts that AWS revenue will grow by more than 40% annually in 2027–2028, driven by demand for cloud computing and AI. The company also plans to begin offering its own Trainium AI chips for use outside of AWS starting in late 2027.

Intel shares fell more than 20% in after-hours trading on Thursday following the release of its fourth-quarter guidance, which fell short of analysts' estimates, according to CNBC. The company expects revenue of $15–16 billion, compared with the expected $17.1 billion. Meanwhile, in the third quarter, Intel’s revenue rose 21% to $16.51 billion, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.52, compared with the expected $0.4.

Revenue from the client computing division fell 5% to $8.1 billion, while revenue from data centers and AI rose 78% to $7.3 billion. Intel expects the downturn in the PC market to continue at least until mid-2027.

Shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell 13% at the close of Thursday’s regular trading session, marking a record single-day decline, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company’s market value fell by approximately $500 billion after Google Services’ third-quarter revenue came in at $96.3 billion, compared with the expected $98.5 billion. Revenue growth for the search business slowed to 12% from 17% in the previous quarter.

Investors are concerned about rising AI costs and declining profitability in search advertising, the WSJ explains. According to Google, searches conducted in AI Mode generate less advertising revenue than traditional searches. Competition from OpenAI, which is actively expanding ChatGPT’s advertising business, is creating additional pressure, the newspaper notes.

— Japan's broad-based Topix index fell 1.3%, while the Nikkei 225 dropped 2.4%.

— Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index rose 1.7%, while mainland China's CSI 300 Index fell 0.5%.

— In South Korea, the KOSPI and KOSDAQ indices plummeted by 4.2%.

— Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.2%.

— Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.9%, S&P 500 futures dropped 0.9%, and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures declined 0.2%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor