Published 2024-07-20 06.38
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The Crowdstrike crash spread the “blue screen of death” worldwide.
Flights were stopped from taking off, payment systems were down and healthcare was disrupted.
Now it can take weeks to restore everything, The Guardian reports.
– We deeply regret the impact we have caused our customers, says the company’s CEO George Kurtz.
Early on Friday morning, the alarms started going off around the world.
Among the first to be affected in Sweden was Biltema whose payment system was affected and at the same time reports came from airports around the world that there was chaos.
Shortly after the first signs that something was wrong began to appear, the explanation came – an update from the security company Crowdstrike contained incorrect code.
Instead of updating as intended, the IT system was knocked out. “Blue screen of death” spread across the world and during the day more and more effects of the broken update became real.
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full screen chevron-right next “Blue screen of death” the message that appeared on people’s screens has been called.
1 / 2Photo: Caisa Rasmussen/TT
Airplanes were stopped from taking off and travelers were checked in manually with paper and pencil. From Amsterdam to Hong Kong, technical problems were reported that hampered summer travelers.
A total of 5,078 flights should have been stopped during Friday, The Guardian reports.
In Berlin, all flights were temporarily stopped.
Card payments could not be carried out and communication between different social actors became difficult. In the UK, doctors’ surgeries were unable to access their patient records or book new appointments.
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full screen Photo: Yuki Iwamura / AP
Elon Musk stated that the Crowdstrike crash was “a heart attack in the automotive supply chain”.
Troy Hunt, IT security expert, tweeted that it was already confirmed yesterday – it is the biggest IT crash in history so far:
“This is what everyone was worried about at the turn of the millennium, but this time it happened for real”.
Behind the global problems probably lies the human factor, IT expert David Jacoby told Aftonbladet yesterday:
– Yes, I think so, or at least that there will be an error in the code in the programming. This software has to be developed by people, he said.
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1 / 2Foto: Ross D. Franklin / AP
Now it can take weeks to restore all affected systems, reports The Guardian on Saturday morning.
However, unlike a hacker attack, no IT structure has been damaged, however, all affected devices may need to be repaired individually, according to the newspaper.
– In some cases, a solution can be quickly applied, but if computers have reacted so that they get a “blue screen” and end up in eternal loops, they can be more difficult to restore. It could take days or even weeks, Adam Leon Smith of the British BCS, an industry organization with members in 150 countries, told the paper.