The CEO of the cybersecurity company at the centre of Microsoft’s global outage was at a loss for words as he apologised for the chaos caused early on Friday but could not say when everything would return to normal.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz spoke of a massive tech outage after the company deployed a faulty software update to its computers overnight, resulting in flights being grounded around the world, banks being taken offline and media going off air.
“We’re very sorry for the impact this has had on our customers, on our travelers and on all of the people that have been affected by this,” Kurtz said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show.
At one point, a nervous-looking Kurtz became lost for words and had to stop for a sip of water before explaining the source of the massive chaos.
“This is not a cyber attack but is related to this content update,” he said.
When asked why a single content update would cause such widespread outages and disrupt the industry, Kurtz acknowledged the company needed to “take a step back and look at what happened.”
Despite already identifying and deploying fixes to the issues, the CEO was unable to provide a timeline for when all systems would be back up and running again.
“As you can imagine, we’ve been working with customers throughout the night,” he said. “A number of our customers have been rebooting their systems and we’ve made the fix on our end and they’re starting to get up and running.”
“It may take some time,” he added. “Sometimes, some systems don’t recover automatically… We won’t give up until we get all our customers back on track.”
Kurtz also declined to say whether he was shocked by the scale of the unrest.
“Software is a very complex world and it’s certainly a tough job to stay ahead of your opponents all the time,” he said.
“Obviously, we try to understand and mitigate these situations, but sometimes strange interactions happen,” Kurtz continued. “We’re just trying to sort out where that negative reaction came from.”
CrowdStrike issued a warning to customers last night, saying its Falcon Sensor software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash, resulting in what is commonly known as the “Blue Screen of Death”.
Microsoft said the root cause of the global outage had been resolved as of early Friday morning, but the effects of the cybersecurity incident continue to affect some Office 365 apps and services.
But hours later, the chaos was still being felt around the world.
Major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta and United Airlines were forced to suspend operations, while delays and disruptions were reported at other airlines and airports around the world.
At LaGuardia Airport, 30 flights were canceled and 10 were delayed, while at JFK airport, 16 flights were canceled, causing lengthy delays for travelers.
Communications were severely affected and Australian news organisations were taken off the air for several hours.
Banks and financial services companies around the world also reported problems.
