- An antivirus program update caused computers around the world to crash and systems in airlines, hospitals, banks and other organizations to fail.
The Microsoft computer outage disrupted operations at several companies, causing international flight delays and postponing work in the healthcare sector and other industries on Friday morning, July 19.
The error was the result of a defect in an update executed by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which put key Internet systems out of service. The problems began to be detected in the United States and spread to different parts of the world.
George Kurtz, president of CrowdStrike, reported that they have already implemented temporary solutions to the failure that caused the global outage of services.
What caused the computer failure that affected Microsoft
The massive computer crash or blackout was caused by a problem in the update used by CrowdStrike. The update software was faulty and caused Windows computers to enter a reboot situation.
The middle CNN The incident was triggered by faulty code in CrowdStrike’s Falcon product, an antivirus platform.
The failed update resulted in the program being incompatible with Microsoft. As a result, the failure brought systems to a complete standstill.
The affected services
The failure affected banking institutions, stock exchanges, global air transport, medical services and the IT and public systems of several countries. Even the computer system for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games was partially interrupted and prevented the delivery of uniforms and accreditations.
Medical service providers, including the UK’s National Health Service and one of Europe’s largest health centres in northern Germany, were overwhelmed. In addition, news channels’ broadcasts were disrupted. ABC News y Sky News In the UK it was also interrupted due to systems failure.
CrowdStrike issued a statement saying it is actively working with affected customers and ruled out the possibility of a security incident or cyberattack.
“The problem has been identified, isolated and a solution has been deployed,” the text reads.
Microsoft, for its part, said it is investigating the scope of the outage.
The CrowdStrike flaw has not yet been fully resolved
Some experts estimate that it might take several days for all affected organizations to be up and running once more. The current solution would be temporary because CrowdStrike must rewrite the software and reinstall the update, which might take weeks.
Brian Honan, founder of Ireland’s Computer Emergency Response Team, told Forbes that the solutions might require “manual intervention on each affected device individually.” This, in his opinion, translates into time to achieve the recovery of the systems.
CrowdStrike has published a guide to fix the issue, but implementing it may be difficult for users as most are affected by the blue screen and access to their systems is restricted.
“They cannot update the systems remotely and the problem must be resolved manually,” Omer Grossman, director of Israeli cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said in a statement.
The “largest computer blackout in history”
Global service disruptions have never affected so many institutions and organizations around the world.
“This is the biggest case in history. We have never had a global workstation outage like this before,” said Mikko Hyppönen, research director at cybersecurity firm WithSecure.
Regular global outages occur from the “server side” of systems, meaning outages often come from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, internet cable outages, or authentication and DNS issues.
The White House is investigating the failure
The White House announced it is “investigating” the outage caused by CrowdStrike.
“We are aware of the incident and are investigating the issue and its impacts,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told CNN.
Meanwhile, the UK government has called an emergency meeting to discuss the massive system outage.
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2024-07-20 14:06:53
