Banks, airports, TV stations, health care organizations, hotels, and countless other businesses are all facing widespread IT outages, leaving flights grounded and causing widespread disruption, after Windows machines have displayed errors worldwide.
In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Shortly after, reports of disruptions started flooding in from around the world, including from the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US: TV station Sky News went offline, and US airlines United, Delta, and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all flights.
The widespread Windows outages have been linked to a software update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. It is believed the issues are not linked to a malicious cyberattack, cybersecurity officials say, but rather stem from a misconfigured/corrupted update that CrowdStrike pushed out to its customers.
“Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement. “We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”
Engineers from CrowdStrike posted to the company’s Reddit forum that it has seen “widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts” occurring across its software, is working on the problem, and has advised a workaround for impacted systems. It also issued instructions to its customers in an advisory.
The incident has only impacted devices running Windows and not other operating systems. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the issues are and how long they will take to resolve.
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. He later apologized for the incident during a television interview.
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 company says the two incidents are not linked.
Content retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-outage-crowdstrike-global-it-probems/.
