Large-Scale IT Outage Causing International Disruption
A major IT outage has disrupted businesses and institutions in multiple countries, throwing airlines, government services, TV channels, banks, supermarkets, telecoms and media outlets into chaos. Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is reportedly linked to the IT outage affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and businesses across Australia and the world.
In an incident with an international impact, airports in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Malaysia and the Philippines have reported disruptions to services. Airport check-in systems around the world have gone offline and businesses have reported the "blue screen of death" and IT outages.
- The US state of Alaska has said its emergency services are affected and many 911 and non-emergency call centres are not working properly.
- Australia has had broadcast networks fail and supermarkets crippled and Sky News UK went completely off air. Australian airlines Virgin Australia and Jetstar have also had to delay or cancel flights.
- A number of US airlines Delta, United and American Airlines have stopped flights around the world.United, Delta and American Airlines that are all based in the US, have issued a "global ground stop" on all of their flights.
- Social media users have reported queues at Australian stores with payment systems offline and trouble accessing financial institutions like the National Australia Bank.
The reason for the outage is not clear, but appears to be linked to Microsoft PC operating systems. An official Microsoft 365 service update posted on X / Twitter earlier today saying "we're investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services".
The problem appears to have been caused by a software update gone wrong. A newly released version of CrowdStrike’s security software reportedly caused Windows computers to crash and display a standard error blue screen that happens when the operating system cannot load correctly.
This update’s impact has been particularly severe for enterprise customers, with some organizations reporting that thousands of devices, including critical production servers and SQL nodes, have been affected.
Crowdstrike are advising affected users not to open individual support tickets and, as an indication of the potential reputational damage, the company's stock value fell by 20% in pre-market trading - a fall worth $16 billion.
Ilkka Turunen, Field CTO at the software supply chain management Sonatype commented of what’s going on with the Crowdstrike outage. "The widespread outages across the world affecting Microsoft Windows are due to a botched update to a piece of software called Crowdstrike, a well-regarded malware and endpoint protection tool often used by enterprises and many companies across the world... In terms of technical details, the update causes a BSOD loop on any Windows machine essentially making it boot and crash on an infinite loop....
"Making it worse is the fact that there are a significant number of Windows machines that the update was auto-installed on overnight. There are workarounds that customers of theirs will apply, but it seems to be very manual."
"It’s definitely a supply chain style incident - what it shows is that one popular vendor botching an update can have a huge impact on its customers and how far a single well-orchestrated update can spread in a single night. It’s not yet clear if the contents were due to malicious reasons, but it shows how quickly targeted attacks on popular vendors could spread." Turunen said.
In other comment, Alan Stephenson-Brown, CEO of network solutions supplier Evolve said, "News of a global IT outage that has caused problems at airlines, media and banks is a timely reminder that operational resilience should be at the forefront of the business agenda...
Demonstrating that even large corporations aren't immune to IT troubles, this outage highlights the importance of having distributed data centres and rerouting connectivity that ensures business can continue functioning when cloud infrastructure is disrupted. By prioritising both contingency planning and preventative measures, IT systems can be protected.
The impact of this incident is hard to exaggerate and business leaders should carefully consider the systems they have in place to identify potential vulnerabilities before they find themselves the subject of the next IT outages headline.
Downdetector | Crowstrike | BBC | AlJazeera | The Conversation | ABC | Euronews | Telegraph
Image: structuresxx
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