Businesses, hospitals, government agencies, and airlines are now dealing with the consequences of a massive IT failure after Microsoft experienced a massive meltdown entangling millions in the worldwide web.
Hundreds of thousands of computers running on Windows were knocked offline or stuck on so-called ‘blue screens of death.’Banks, airlines, television networks, trains and healthcare systems reported widespread outages starting around 2am ET.The chaos was due to a defect in a single content update by Crowdstrike, a US-based cybersecurity firm used by Microsoft, the company shared at 5:30am ET.Crowdstrike assured the public that the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity attack and that it could take up to 36 hours to fix, analysts told DailyMail.com.
The company’s CEO George Kurtz indicated that the entire outage was the result of a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said on social media. One expert suggested it may be the “largest IT outage in history.”Separately, Microsoft cloud services were restored after an outage, the company said on Friday, even as many users continued to report issues.
The defect was also compounded by another problem related to the cloud service system, Azure.
The chaos stemmed from an update sent by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, to businesses that use its software to protect against hackers and online intruders. But when CrowdStrike’s new code reached computers that run Microsoft Windows software, the machines began to crash….The CrowdStrike flaw was not the only problem facing Microsoft. On Thursday, some Microsoft clients in the central United States, including some airlines, were affected by an outage on its cloud service system, Azure. Microsoft’s cloud service status page indicated that it had identified a preliminary cause, though some users may still be unable to access certain Microsoft 365 apps and services, including Teams video conferencing.
The fix to this defect seems to be challenging to address.
Correcting the glitchy software’s resolution is labor intensive. As one commenter noted, “This is what Y2K wishes it was.”
But simply restarting might not fix the issue, users report. On Reddit, IT workers discussed the dizzying scope of the outage.“This is what Y2K wishes it was,” one user commented. Others said the outage was the worst they’ve seen and noted the multiple steps they’re taking to get their employers back online….Most of the work of getting systems working again will fall to IT professionals working for organizations. But people at home can attempt to work around the blue screen of death as well.Your best bet right now is to restore your computer to a version before the update. To do so, power on your PC, but before it can launch, press and hold the power button to turn it back off. Do this three times in a row, and after the third time, you should see some advanced settings appear. Go to “advanced options,” then “system restore.”
Many businesses are now reevaluating their involvement with Crowdstrike.
Tech mogul Elon Musk has announced he has removed Crowdstrike from all his systems amid the ongoing glitch.The SpaceX and Tesla CEO made the announcement on social media platform X.
The timing of this could not be worse for the airline industry, which is in the middle of the heavy summer travel season.
Air travel was immediately hit, as carriers depend on smooth scheduling that, when interrupted, can ripple into lengthy delays. Out of more than 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 2,691 have been cancelled globally and more are expected to be called off, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.Airports from Los Angeles to Singapore, Amsterdam and Berlin said airlines were checking in passengers with handwritten boarding passes, causing delays.
Of course, this is on top of all the government agencies, medical facilities, and other business entities that were also impacted.
Until this is all resolved, it appears that the “Internet of Things” has temporarily succumbed to the “Blue Screen of Death”.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY