Microsoft, which hosts cloud services to businesses and governments, said it was grappling with service outages after an issue triggered by software distributed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
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A technology crisis left airline, bank, hospital and emergency services workers around the world facing the dreaded “blue screen of death” on Friday as their computers went inert in what is described as a historic breakdown.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it actually happened this time,” said Troy Hunt, an Internet security analyst. said via.
Across continents, Microsoft users have reported being suddenly knocked offline, and the culprit has been determined to be cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which claims one of its routine software updates went offline. malfunctioned.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a defect detected in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a statement.
Customers using Mac and Linux operating systems were not affected, CrowdStrike said.
When the faulty update crashed computer systems, many travelers at the airport were left stranded, hospital appointments were delayed and live news broadcasts were interrupted.
How big is the outage?
It's massive, deep and sudden.
Some IT problems cascade, creating waves of outages. But in this case, the flaw spread almost immediately to Microsoft systems around the world. The company says its Windows 365 Cloud PCs, apps and services were affected.
Microsoft remains the dominant desktop operating system worldwide, with more than 72% market share, according to Statcounter website. The CrowdStrike issue does not directly affect all of these machines: its security software is mainly used by businesses and large organizations. The company claims that customers include 43 U.S. states and nearly 300 Fortune 500 companies.
Hundreds of thousands of Microsoft outages were reported Friday, according to Fault detectorthe website that tracks outages based on user reports.
In 16 hours, 311,000 reports of global outages were received, Michelle Badrian, senior communications manager at Ookla, which owns Downdetector, told NPR. Of this figure, she added, 58,000 reports came from the United States, 26,000 from the United Kingdom and 20,000 from India. Large numbers of reports also came in from Germany, Canada and Australia.
There are signs that relief is on the way: Badrian said that as of midday ET on Friday, “we are seeing a decline in reporting volumes both for Microsoft services and across services.”
Although server-related outages are common, the scale of CrowdStrike's disruption surprised many technology observers.
“This IT outage is a stark reminder of how dependent we are on technology and many other things happening behind the scenes that most of us are unaware of,” said Adam Robinson, a CTO based in Louisville. . on. “Modern society and the many comforts we enjoy are a fragile thing. »
Passengers wait outside check-in counters at Berlin Brandenburg Airport in Schönefeld, Germany, on Friday after a widespread technology outage disrupted flights, banks, media and businesses around the world.
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Christoph Soeder/AP/DPA
What about plane travel?
More than 2,000 flights to or from the United States were canceled as of noon ET Friday, and more than twice that number were delayed, according to the agency. Aware of theft tracking site.
Delta Airlines, United Airlines and American Airlines announced they were resuming some or all of their scheduled flights after initially being grounded when the problem hit their systems. Airlines also said they were granting waivers to affected customers.
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, a major hub for long-distance flights, said a “global system outage” impacted inbound and outbound flights on one of the busiest days of the year.
Landings at Zurich airport were suspended and flights in Hungary halted.
Spanish airport operator Aena reported a computer “incident” at all Spanish airports which she said could lead to delays.
What other types of services have been taken offline?
In some states, notably Alaska And Ohio911 phone lines were down.
The United Kingdom's National Health Service has been widely affected. The NHS said As of Friday, doctor's appointments and patient records had been affected, but there was no known impact on emergency services. The BBC reported that two thirds of GP practices in Northern Ireland had been affected, with doctors unable to access patient records, generate prescriptions or see the results of laboratory tests.
In Germany, some hospitals canceled non-urgent operations.
Broadcasters around the world have also been affected. In France And Australialive television broadcasts were interrupted.
Sky News, a major British news channel, was interrupted for a period on Friday morning. He returned later, but without “all abilities,“, declared its president, David Rhodes, on X Friday afternoon. An article on ABC News in Australia website said the broadcaster was experiencing a “major network outage”.
The London Stock Exchange news service stopped working. Shipping in the Baltic has also been affected, with the Gdansk container hub in Poland hit by major disruptions.
How do people repair their computers?
CrowdStrike says the problem was not a cyberattack, but rather a software issue. THE the company said that after identifying the problem, it removed the “problem channel file” that was affecting customers' systems.
Because of the move, if a Windows system with CrowdStrike's Falcon sensor came online after 1:27 a.m. ET Friday, the company said, it would not be affected.
He also posted a workaround that involves booting a Windows machine into a recovery environment, deleting a single file from the CrowdStrike directory, and rebooting.
An airport information screen displays an error message rather than travel information at San Francisco International Airport on Friday, after a computer glitch disrupted systems across the United States and dozens of other countries.
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What is CrowdStrike?
It is an American cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas. The company went public in 2019 and is currently in the S&P 500. As of early July, CrowdStrike shares were posting months of gains. But stock prices fell sharply in early trading Friday.
“This is clearly a major problem for CrowdStrike,” said WedBush analyst Dan Ives.
CrowdStrike made headlines in 2016, when the company was hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate a breach of its data systems. CrowdStrike determined that the hack was a case of foreign interference – the work of Russian-backed hacking groups.
The company's flagship product is its 'Falcon' cybersecurity software – and it has attributed the current problem to a change in a sensor in that system. This also helps explain how and why the resulting outages were able to propagate so quickly: rather than being stored locally, the Falcon Security Platform “is 100% cloud-based.”
The company apologized Friday for the outages, saying, “We understand the severity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
