One of the biggest IT crashes on Friday was due to a faulty software update, affecting almost all the sectors including the financial industry, aviation, public transport, corporates, media broadcasting, and hospitality. Some experts called it the largest IT outage in history.
Over 5,000 global flight cancellations were reported by an aviation analytic firm, FlightAware. Major airports from Los Angeles to Singapore also experienced delays due to outages. Hospitals could not access scheduled appointments and patient records in several countries.
Disturbances were seen in countries such as Kenya, Ukraine, and Australia, impacting everything from supermarkets and mobile phone services to media companies.
The outage came as CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, experienced major disruption in its recent update. It took the firm around one and half hours to fix the bug but the problem persisted much longer than that.
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on X, "We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online."
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed that this was not a cyberattack or a security problem.
CrowdStrike called it a "Falcon sensor" issue on its support page. The issue impacted computers running the Windows operating system, displaying a blue screen and CrowdStrike software.
"Customers running Falcon sensor for Windows version 7.11 and above, that were online between Friday, July 19, 2024 04:09 UTC and Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC, may be impacted. Systems running Falcon sensor for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration from 04:09 UTC to 05:27 UTC – were susceptible to a system crash," Crowdstrike said.
Chief Information Officer at identity security firm CyberArk, Omer Grossman said told CBS News, "It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed the 'Blue Screen of Death' they cannot be updated remotely and the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days."
Image Source: Unsplash
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