A massive technology outage has disrupted businesses and institutions in multiple countries, throwing airports, airlines, rail companies, government services, banks, stock exchanges, supermarkets, telecoms, health systems and media outlets into chaos.
The disruption was caused by an update to a product offered by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which had caused machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system to crash.
Reporting from London, Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull said, “CrowdStrike seems to have had some sort of mandatory update to its software that went horribly wrong.”
The company had reported that the issue was related to its Falcon sensor product, engineers identifying a “content deployment problem”, said Hull.
“Essentially it happens as you’re sitting in front of your terminal. If your terminal is a Microsoft Windows terminal, it suddenly goes to a blank blue screen. It’s called the ‘blue screen of death’ error. You are locked out of your operating system,” Hull said.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Friday that the outage was not a “security or cyber incident”.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” he wrote on X.
“As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.”
Microsoft said on…
