A botched update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike triggered chaos across global IT systems on Friday, causing major disruptions for industries, including banks and airlines.
“We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state,” Microsoft said.
CrowdStrike Chief Executive Officer (CEO) George Kurtz confirmed the cybersecurity firm’s role in the outage, blaming an update “defect.”
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a post on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- An update to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s security software caused an outage in Microsoft’s cloud services on Friday, disrupting businesses worldwide.
- CNN reports flights from large U.S. airlines, including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and American Airlines, were grounded as they worked through the problems.
- The London Stock Exchange also said it had been hit, with a disruption to RNS, its news feed of company statements.
The impact on cyber insurance providers remains to be seen, but there will be news to come on that.
Of note, issues arising from updates going wrong aren’t unprecedented.
• Google Cloud Outage (2020):
• GitHub Outage (2018):
• Slack Outage (2020):
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outage (2017):