Microsoft-CrowdStrike Outage: That Nearly Brought The World To A Standstill. The world is witnessing the largest – Microsoft outage disrupting flights, health care, emergency call services, banks and the beloved Starbucks and McDonald’s! Airports, especially in the United States, have been hit hard as hundreds of thousands of travelers are stranded due to delayed services, and grounded planes.
Microsoft’s outage is attributed to CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity firm, which highlighted a fault in its software update. CrowdStrike uses cloud technology to apply cyber protections to devices connected to the internet.
As such, computers and other devices running Microsoft’s Windows OS crashed on Friday. Microsoft confirmed that a CrowdStrike update was the culprit that brought down crucial IT systems globally.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike CEO, said the issue had been identified and a solution was being implemented. He highlighted that the system was sent an update which had a software bug. This caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system.
Kurtz said many of their customers rebooted the system. He assured users that CrowdStrike has fixed the problem and is working with some of the systems that aren’t recovering. Kurtz said it could take time for some systems to recover.
Microsoft urged customers, who continue to experience issues, to reach out to CrowdStrike for assistance. Satnam Narang, senior staff researcher at Tenable, described the outage as unprecedented. He said the security software was problematic as it has to have more privileged access to these machines.
Narang explained that the issue was nothing to do with Microsoft as it was not a Windows issue, but a bad update from security software.
