In what will go down as the most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. crashed countless Microsoft Windows computer systems around the world.
Windows users worldwide are experiencing a 'recovery' phase following a major outage. The disruption has impacted a range of institutions, including airports, businesses, media broadcasting, the stock market, government offices, and hospitality.
1. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Friday took to X and wrote, “We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
2. In India, passengers at airports are still experiencing issues for the second consecutive day. While speaking to ANI, one traveler described the difficulties faced due to the disruption, noting that they had not slept the entire night. He said, “I was travelling from Mumbai to Bengaluru yesterday. The flight got cancelled...Although we were provided with the service, they did not accommodate us. We had to wait for the whole night and have not slept for the whole night.”
3. As per ANI report, Chennai Airport flights are still disrupted, and air traffic is affected due to the blue screen error. Sharing his woes, a passenger named Prabakaran told ANI, “From tomorrow (Sunday), my work permit gets over, so I am in a must-go situation to go to the Maldives today (Saturday), but due to the cancelled flight, I have been asked to go tomorrow. I am clueless about where to stay and about job assurance.”
4. Budget airline IndiGo announced that flight services and operations have resumed following the resolution of the Microsoft issue. However, after cancelling more than 200 flights on Friday, the airline said “customers may still experience delays and schedule disruptions over the weekend”. On the other hand, SpiceJet informed that all faced zero flight cancellations during the outage.
5. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said only 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) were affected by the global Microsoft Windows outage. “Our assessment shows that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being resolved,” the central bank said in a statement. It added that it had averted the global risk as its systems were not integrated with cloud-based services. Only a few banks were using the CrowdStrike tool, limiting the exposure of the disruption caused by the update.
6. In Australia, a cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), warned that "malicious websites and unofficial code" are being circulated online, falsely claiming to assist with recovery from Friday's global digital outage. It said, “A number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident.”
7. Companies like Marriott, The Wall Street Journal, London Stock Exchange, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Sky News all were affected by the global outage.
8. The outage also raised concerns that many organizations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it, goes down. As per Reuters report, experts suggested that similar disruptions will continue unless organisations develop more robust contingency plans and improve their backup systems.
9. Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson told Reuters that, “This event is a reminder of how complex and intertwined our global computing systems are and how vulnerable they are to a mistake and an error. While most companies don't really have an alternative to Microsoft, they do have alternatives for security." “This may cause many companies to reconsider which security product they use, and whether they need to diversify across different security products in order to prevent these types of outages,” he added.
10. The CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz posted a technical overview of the outage, that is currently being investigated. In a post on X, he said, “As CrowdStrike continues to work with customers and partners to resolve this incident, our team has written a technical overview of today’s events. We will continue to update our findings as the investigation progresses.”
(With inputs from Bloomberg, Reuters, ANI)
