By Parameswaran Valeri
A global tech outage triggered by a cybersecurity update crippled operations across sectors including air travel, healthcare, finance and many more, in the early hours of Friday. The services were restored in the afternoon to bring systems back to normal functioning.
The trigger
A global Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike based in the US was pushing an update in the early hours of Friday (05:30 GMT) in their Falcon Sensor software. The software is widely used in the Microsoft ecosystem and the update triggered outages in Microsoft 365 apps and services. This led to Microsoft Windows to crash and go into a bootloop, displaying a blue screen, known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’.
According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, The issue stemmed from a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts, as the update didn’t impact Mac and Linux hosts. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack”, he made it clear while posting on X. The tech outage first appeared to be in the machines in North America which soon spread across the globe.
Industries impacted
Air Travel services were down with almost all of the air traffic being grounded for hours across the globe. Airports worldwide witnessed chaos and confusion over the delayed flights and had to rely on manual check-in process. Major airlines including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, grounded their flights due to the unforeseen circumstances. Later the flights of Turkish Airlines, Indian Airlines, Air India, Indigo, SpiceJet also had to delay or cancel their flights.
The Banking and Financial sector was impacted hugely from the outage, with multiple leading banks facing issues in services like Netbanking, Instant Money Transfer and ATMs. Multiple brokerages in India including Edelweiss Mutual Fund, Motilal Oswal, and IIFL Securities faced technical difficulties in their operations. India’s banking sector was, however, not impacted and were able to execute transactions without issues.
Healthcare institutions in multiple nations including England, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia reported to have issues in their various functionalities.
Media outlets namely Sky News from Britain and ABC from Australia had to halt their broadcast for hours before resuming later in the day.
The fix
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.” said the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz on X on 09:45 GMT.
Microsoft said that the root cause of breakdown of its 365 apps has been fixed, but the residual impact of the cybersecurity failures are continuing to affect some customers.The services affected due to the outage are slowly resuming after hours of disruption, with many services working on completely restoring their services at the time of writing.
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