An unprecedented global IT outage caused chaos around the world on Friday morning, leaving passengers stranded at airports, TV networks unable to broadcast and banks unable to serve their customers.
Leading cyber security provider CrowdStrike released a faulty software update that hit users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, many of whom were greeted with crashed computers and the so-called “blue screen of death” after being unable to they started again.
“We are aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud computers caused by a recent update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software,” Microsoft said in its 365 Status X account.
Microsoft warned that the bug could cause computers to get “stuck in a restart state.”
In an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Kurtz said CrowdStrike was “deeply sorry” for the outage.
Computers from the US to Europe, China and beyond were affected by what is now considered one of the largest IT outages in history.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” noted cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said.
What happened? What caused the outage?
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was the result of a poor software update and that a fix was in place. Separately, Microsoft blamed the outage on a “third-party software provider” and said it was being addressed.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a lengthy X post. “Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.”
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix is in place… Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike’s customers,” Kurtz added.
CrowdStrike has yet to provide many specifics. CrowdStrike reportedly warned customers that the issue was related to Falcon, a service that scans the company’s devices for hacking attempts and other cybersecurity threats.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Austin-based company told customers in a status update that the problem was with a software change it had pushed through Falcon to customers’ computers.
The company said its engineers had reversed the change, but customers will have to use a workaround to download a fix for affected computers.
Was the outage caused by hackers or a cyber attack?
CrowdStrike said the outage “is not a security incident or cyber attack.” Instead, it resulted from a bug in a software change he pushed to customers.
What’s next for the public?
Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft have signaled that a fix is already underway, though it’s unclear when full service will be restored to the various industries affected by the flaw.
Kurtz could not give a timeline for when all systems would be back up and running again.
“As you can imagine, we’ve been with our customers all night,” he said. “A lot of customers are restarting the system and it’s working because we fixed it in the end.”
“It might be a while,” he added. “Sometimes, some systems won’t automatically recover … we won’t give up until we get every customer back to where they were.”
According to the Journal, some affected users may be back up and running soon, but for others, it could take weeks, depending on the system in use, said Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Defused. .
“The regulation that CrowdStrike has provided is quite manual and can be difficult, in some cases, to deploy at scale,” he told the paper.
In an interview with CNBC on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO Kurtz said the company was looking at ways to automate regulation, suggesting that customers are stuck with manual regulation for now.
That means affected entities — from banks to stock exchanges to seaports — could take days to fully recover, Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, told Bloomberg News.
“You’re going to have men in white vans trying to manually solve this problem even as they solve it,” Woodward told the media. “This is a big deal.”
Planes and trains stopped around the world
US airports were already packed with stranded passengers after the software glitch caused flight cancellations and delays. American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines were among those that grounded flights. Europe’s Ryanair said it was experiencing problems “due to a global third-party system outage”.
The MTA advised New York commuters that its customer IT systems were “temporarily offline” due to the technical outage, but train and bus services were still running.
As of 8 a.m. Friday, nearly 2,700 flights had been canceled, including more than 1,000 in the U.S. alone, the Journal reported, citing data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company. More than 21,000 flights worldwide were delayed by midday Friday, the newspaper reported, citing flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Banks stop service
Banks and other financial services firms in Germany, Australia, India and various other countries warned customers of service disruptions, while merchants were reportedly left unable to complete transactions.
Bank of America, Visa, TD Bank, Wells Fargo and many other banks had problems as of Friday morning, according to DownDetector.
TV networks are down
UK-based Sky News was unable to broadcast morning coverage and said it was “working hard to restore all services”. News media in Australia also experienced problems with live coverage.
By postal wire
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