A widespread IT outage linked to a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has caused significant disruptions to businesses and services around the world that use Microsoft software, affecting banks, airports, TV stations, hotels and many other industries.
Wired Reports Early on Friday morning, businesses using Microsoft’s Windows operating system began experiencing widespread technical issues, including devices experiencing blue screens of death (BSODs).The issue quickly spread across the world, affecting organisations in Australia, the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands and the US.
The outage had far-reaching effects across a range of sectors. In the aviation industry, major US airlines including United Airlines, Delta and American Airlines issued a “global grounding” of all flights. The media was also affected, with Sky News taken offline. There was also disruption in the healthcare sector, with NHS England confirming that GP bookings and patient record systems were affected.
Cybersecurity officials say the issues are not the result of a malicious cyberattack. The problems are due to misconfigurations or corruption in updates that cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike distributed to customers. The incident appears to only affect devices running the Windows operating system.
BANGKOK, Thailand, July 19, 2024. Passengers wait with piles of luggage at Suvarnabhumi airport after a global IT outage affected users due to a combination of a Microsoft outage and CrowdStrike IT issues, on July 19, 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand. (Photo by Mylee Osten Tan/Getty Images)
CrowdStrike engineers acknowledged the issue on the company’s Reddit forum, confirming “widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts” across their software. They are actively working to resolve the issue and are advising customers on a workaround for affected systems. The company has also issued instructions as part of its customer advice.
The scale of the outage is massive as CrowdStrike serves more than 24,000 customers worldwide. The company offers endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology that runs on thousands of “endpoints” such as computers, ATMs and Internet of Things devices, scanning them to identify real-time threats from cybercriminals.
The economic impact of these outages could cost “millions of dollars” to organizations that are forced to shut down or suspend operations, said Lukas Oleynik, an independent cybersecurity consultant. Oleynik noted that CrowdStrike’s updates appear to be related to its Falcon Sensor product, part of the company’s security tools designed to block attacks on systems.
In this photo illustration, Sky News displays an interruption announcement on a television screen as an IT failure stops broadcasting, in London, England, July 19, 2024. Businesses, travel agencies and Microsoft users around the world were affected by today’s technology outage. (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont reported on social media that he had seen a copy of CrowdStrike’s update, saying that the file was not properly formatted and “crashes Windows every time.” Beaumont also said that there doesn’t appear to be an automatic way to fix the issue at this time.
Brody Nisbett, director of monitoring at CrowdStrike, shared a workaround on social media. The process involves booting the Windows machine into safe mode, locating and deleting a specific file, then rebooting the machine normally. Nisbett said, “There is some sort of fix, so some devices between BSODs should be able to get a new channel file and remain stable.”
Olejnik points out: “When you have multiple software systems in your system that are maintained by different vendors, this equates to placing trust in those vendors. They can become single points of failure, as they have here, with many different companies affected.”
This is a developing story.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
