Source: Europa Press News / Getty / Crowdstrike
A massive global IT
outage is crippling businesses and making lives miserable.
If you’re a business that operates on
Microsoft Windows-based systems, the past 48 hours have not been good for you, and your IT department is most definitely stressing out.
Banks, airports, TV stations, healthcare organizations, hotels, and other businesses were greeted by BSODs (Blue Screens of Death).
Blue Screens of Death hit the giant screens in Times Square.
What Caused The Global Disruption?
The outage hit computers running the Windows operating system and was the result of a bug in an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia with computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system began experiencing Blue Screens of Death.
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Not too long after the issue arose, there were numerous reports of disruptions from the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US.
TV stations like
Sky News were offline, and US airlines United, Delta, and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all flights.
CrowdStrike says the outage wasn’t malicious and, through its CEO, issued a statement on the matter.
Per
Wired:
Hours after the issues started to emerge, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued a statement about the outages, saying the company has found a “defect” in an update for Windows that it issued. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.” In the statement, Kurtz confirmed that Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted by the update and said that its customers should refer to its support portal.
A Microsoft spokesperson also issued a statement saying it is aware of the problems linked to Windows devices and the company believes a “resolution is forthcoming.” At the same time as the CrowdStrike issues emerged, Microsoft was also dealing with its own, apparently unrelated, outage of its Azure cloud services.
The reactions to the outage that are all over timelines well after the “fix.”
You can see those in the gallery below.
