Massive Tech Outage Disrupts Businesses, Banks, Airlines

A global technology outage grounded flights, knocked businesses, banks and hospital systems offline and disrupted media outlets starting Thursday night into Friday.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported that the issue was due to a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows and was not a security incident or cyberattack. According to media reports, CrowdStrike issued an alert at 5:30 GMT on July 19 noting that its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen. The company shared a manual workaround Friday afternoon to rectify the issue. The faulty update — part of a routine process — now requires each affected computer to be started in a special recovery mode and fixed manually.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack,” commented the firm in an updated July 19 statement. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We assure our customers that CrowdStrike is operating normally, and this issue does not affect our Falcon platform systems. If your systems are operating normally, there is no impact to their protection if the Falcon Sensor is installed.”

The major global IT outage hit industries across the world with airlines, banks, shops and broadcasters affected. Nearly 4,300 flights had been canceled worldwide as of Friday afternoon due to the global IT outage, according to Cirium. This equates to 3.9% of all scheduled flights globally, with the figure subject to change as the day progresses. Major U.S. airlines, including, United, American and Delta, grounded flights and experienced global delays. Media reports noted that Representative Eric Swalwell — a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity — confirmed a “global ground stop.” Alaska State Troopers reported that 911 services were down across the state.

Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure acknowledged the issue impacting virtual machines running Windows OS, with CrowdStrike’s Falcon agent getting stuck in a “restarting state.” Despite Microsoft stating it had fixed the issue, problems persist with blue error screens appearing on public screens across the U.S. and abroad. Microsoft said Friday that it has completed its mitigation actions and that telemetry indicated all previously impacted Microsoft 365 app services have recovered.

“We’re entering a period of monitoring to ensure impact is fully resolved,” the company said.

MDM will update this brief as more details become available.

Editor’s Note:

Was your business impacted by the Microsoft outage? We welcome any comments at editor@mdm.com or below. We’re also happy to keep them anonymous, as we’re just looking to learn more about it’s industry impact.

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