An unprecedented global IT outage caused worldwide chaos on Friday morning, leaving passengers stranded in airports, television stations off the air and banks unable to serve customers.
CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity provider, released a flawed software update that dealt a major blow to users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, causing many of their computers to crash and experience the so-called “blue screen of death” that prevents them from rebooting.
“We are aware that a recent update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software is causing issues for Windows 365 Cloud PCs,” Microsoft said in a statement. 365 Status X Account.
Microsoft warned that the bug could cause computers to become “stuck in a reboot state.”
Appearing on NBC’s Today show, Kurtz said CrowdStrike was “deeply sorry” for the outage.
The outage, already considered one of the largest IT outages in history, affected computers around the world, from the US to Europe to China.
“This is basically what everyone was worried about during Y2K, but this time it actually happened,” said a prominent cybersecurity expert. Expert Troy Hunt says:.
What happened? What caused the outage?
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was the result of a failed software update and that a fix had been distributed, while Microsoft blamed a “third-party software provider” for the outage and said it was working on it.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by the flaw found in the single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a lengthy post on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.”
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. Our team is committed to ensuring the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers,” Kurtz added.
CrowdStrike has not yet released further details. The company reportedly warned customers that the issue was related to Falcon, a service that scans corporate devices for hacking attempts and other cybersecurity threats.
In a status update to customers, the Austin-based company said the problem was with software changes it had pushed to their computers via Falcon, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company said its engineers have reverted the change, but customers still need to use a workaround to download a patch to affected computers.
Was the outage caused by a hacker or cyber attack?
CrowdStrike said the outage was “not the result of a security incident or cyberattack” and blamed it on a bug in software changes it had pushed out to customers.
What’s next for the general public?
Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft have indicated that fixes are already underway, but it’s unclear when full service will be restored across the various industries affected by the flaw.
Kurtz was unable to give 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.”
Some affected users may be able to recover quickly, but it could take weeks depending on the systems they use, said Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Diffused, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“The fixes offered by CrowdStrike are highly manual and in some cases may be difficult to deploy at scale,” he told the paper.
Planes and trains halted around the world
The software glitch caused flight cancellations and delays, stranding passengers at US airports, with American Airlines, Delta and United among those grounding flights, while Europe’s Ryanair said it was experiencing problems “due to a global third-party system outage.”
MTA Advice for New York commuters The company’s customers’ IT systems were “temporarily taken offline” due to a technical glitch, but trains and buses continued to run.
Banks suspend services
Banks and other financial services companies in Germany, Australia, India and various other countries warned customers of outages, reportedly leaving traders unable to execute trades.
Many banks, including Bank of America, Visa, TD Bank and Wells Fargo, were experiencing problems as of Friday morning. According to DownDetector.
TV networks are down
Britain-based Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news and said it was “working hard to restore all services”, while Australian news stations also had problems broadcasting live.
With post wire
