A defective software update has left industries across the world reeling with everything from flights to hospitals impacted.
News of major outages started being reported yesterday but this morning, there has been a flood of stories from across the globe.
Cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, has put up its hand and admitted that a “defect” in one of its software updates has knocked out Windows operating systems.
Planes, Trains and Everything Else
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that some airlines in Central US opted to ground flights after reporting issues with the Microsoft cloud service system, Azure. Microsoft responded on X that it was “…working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion.”
Hours later, FlightGlobal reported that United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines had all stopped departures. Aviation analytics company, Cirium, provided figures to BBC News revealing that 512 flights had been grounded in the US; 92 in Germany and 56 in India though Italy, Holland, Australia and Canada were also reporting issues. Check-ins were impacted in Sydney, Paris, Berlin and across Spain, reported NBC News.
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Critical Services Impacted
For NBC News, the impact was felt at home. Its British partner, Sky News, went offline as the issues quickly spread beyond the world of aviation. “Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologize for the interruption. Much of our news report is still available online, and we are working hard to restore all services,” Sky News Executive Chairman David Rhodes said on X.
Critical services were also impacted. Israel reported disruption in some of its hospitals. Posting on Facebook, the Alaska State Troopers warned the public that 911 and non-emergency phone numbers across the whole state were not working “due to a nationwide technology-related outage.”
In the UK, the National Health Service released a message on X saying that it had been affected as had some pharmacies. Train operators in the country pointed to the outage as some departures were cancelled. The impact were also felt at the London Stock Exchange where its regulatory news service fell silent. Supermarkets started reporting problems at cashiers while some businesses shared they were having issues accessing Teams video conferencing.
Cyberattack Ruled Out
While the chaos continued, the chief executive of CrowdStrike was keen to allay fears that this was an attack. George Kurtz said in a statement that his company was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” He added: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft continually updated customers, admitting, even when “the underlying cause” had been fixed, that “residual impact is continuing to affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services”.
James Bore is a UK-based Chartered Security Professional, author and consultant focusing on security and technology. He echoes Microsoft, warning that this outage is not going to be swiftly solved. He told Tech.co “Because of the manual nature of the fix, problems are going to persist likely for days. Even then I expect there will be systems which are only used maybe once a month that people won’t even notice have failed until payroll doesn’t happen.” He advises: “Anyone impacted by this should be doing a full audit of all their systems, including the ones everyone’s forgotten about.”
Could IT Outage Happen Again?
As normality slowly returns; and a very bashful CrowdStrike CEO gives what will be the first of many broadcasted apologies, CrowdStrike has taken a financial hit for the outage. BBC News reports that it “…has lost a fifth of its value in pre-market trading in the US – down 21% in unofficial trading.” This could equate to a loss of $16 billion in its overnight valuation.
There will be financial implications for many other businesses around the world as well as some big questions to grapple with. As Bore says, this outage should be a lesson to businesses that they must have continuity plans in place so that they can “…keep the business functioning at a basic level without technology”. He points to doctors resorting to writing paper prescriptions in the UK as an example.
He is blunt in his appraisal of the outage. “Other businesses have relied too much on technology and so don’t have these continuity processes, and they’ll be hardest hit”, he says. For emergency services, there shouldn’t be “one single point of failure”, he explains and this is got round by using technological diversity. After all, he states: “…a simple software bug in a third party security tool should not be able to take down emergency services lines.”
