A software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally on Friday, grounding flights and hitting services from banking to healthcare.
An update to a product offered by global cyberscurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to be the trigger, affecting customers using Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that the company was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” and that a fix was being deployed.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said in the post.
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Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure said it was aware of the issue that impacted virtual machines running Windows OS and the CrowdStrike Falcon agent getting stuck in a “restarting state,” amid an ongoing global outage.
In an alert to clients issued at 0530 GMT on Friday, CrowdStrike said its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”. It also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
Early on Friday, major U.S. airlines – American Airlines, Delta Airlines (DAL.N) and United Airlines – grounded flights, while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.
Airports in Singapore, Hong Kong and India said the outage meant some airlines were having to check in passengers manually.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s busiest, said it was affected, while airline Iberia said it had been operating manually at airports until its electronic check-in counters and online check-ins were reactivated. It said there had been some delays but no flight cancellations.
Air France-KLM said its operations were disrupted.
While there were reports of companies gradually restoring their services, analysts weighed the potential of what one called the biggest ever outage in the industry and the broader economy.
“IT security tools are all designed to ensure that companies can continue to operate in the worst-case scenario of a data breach, so to be the root cause of a global IT outage is an unmitigated disaster,” said Ajay Unni, CEO of StickmanCyber, one of Australia’s largest cybersecurity services companies.
With information from Reuters
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