A global tech outage was disrupting operations in multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to health care hit by system problems.
According to an alert sent by global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s Falcon Sensor software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “blue screen of death.”
The problem crashed Windows machines and servers, sending them into a loop of recovery so that they couldn’t restart.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” company CEO George Kurtz said in a message posted on social media. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz said in an interview with NBC’s morning news program Today.
Kurtz said that while some systems won’t automatically recover, the company would “make sure every customer is fully recovered.”
The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, as well as airlines.
Microsoft said on Friday that the underlying cause for outage of its 365 apps and services has been fixed, but the residual impact of cybersecurity outages are continuing to affect some customers.
Scale of outage concerns experts
Even as companies and institutions began restoring regular services, experts said the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre, told Reuters.
“I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale,” said Martin.
Ritesh Kotak, cybersecurity and tech analyst, told CBC News Network that clients and consumers will have to be patient.
“A lot of these systems have redundancies that are built into them. So, for example, when one system fails, it can piggyback off another system; it just literally passes the baton,” said Kotak.
“It’s not as smooth sometimes as one may think … but depending on the scale of the servers impacted sometimes it takes just a little bit of time to pass over that baton and then fix the problem and then bring those services back on to the original servers.”
Several airlines affected
Airline traffic was especially affected, though the impacts were variable. A spokesperson from…
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