IT outages were seen throughout the world on Friday morning after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity technology firm, pushed an update that was faulty.
This mistake quickly led to global chaos, as airlines, media outlets, banks, hospitals, and more had outages that disrupted their work and services.
What Is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is an American-based cybersecurity technology firm. The company provides various services, such as threat intelligence, cyberattack response, and cloud workload protection.
CrowdStrike is used by various companies and services. For the most part, this latest IT event only impacted Microsoft-based computers that had CrowdStrike.
What Caused the Outage?
According to CrowdStrike, this major outage was not caused by any type of cyber attack, as was first theorized by some online.
Instead, this outage was only from a software issue that they were not aware of.
The Bug Has Been Fixed
After various institutions, businesses, and services were disrupted because of this IT outage on Friday morning, CrowdStrike quickly got to work to figure out what happened.
The firm has already come out to clarify that they have identified the problem and that a fix has now been deployed. However, they have warned that it may be a while before services and businesses are able to get their systems back up and running.
How Long Will These Fixes Take?
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, explained that every business and company may have a different timeline for when their systems may be fully fixed and able to run normally again.
Some systems may already be back up and running. Meanwhile, others may take a while and have to go through a different process to get their systems fixed.
CrowdStrike Warns Customers
CrowdStrike also made sure to warn their customers around the world, as this event has already brought about bad actors looking to exploit them.
Kurtz said, “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this. I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives. Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.”
Emergency Services Have Been Affected
There were many services affected by this IT outage around the world. Perhaps most worryingly, many emergency services in the U.S. faced these outages — and may continue to.
For example, the Phoenix, Arizona Police Department had issues with their computerized 911 dispatch center. However, the entire center was able to continue operations.
Court Systems Have Been Hit
Meanwhile, some court systems have also been impacted, as the Superior Court of Los Angeles County revealed they couldn’t conduct business because of this outage.
As a result, they’ve had to reschedule remote hearings that were initially scheduled for Friday.
Emergency Declarations in the United States
Some states have already signed Emergency Declarations because of this outage. The mayor of Portland has done so, as many of the city’s servers, as well as employee computers, were down.
This made it impossible for city workers to actually work, and outages majorly impacted sign-on cloud services and VPN connections.
Hospitals Have Alerted the Public
Many hospitals around the country — and the world — have also notified the public that they are trying to deal with this outage.
This has led to many hospitals, such as Mass General Brigham in Boston, canceling all elective surgeries as they await an IT fix.
Outage Has Led to Transportation Delays
This IT outage has hit many transportation services in incredible ways. Many metro systems, such as the D.C. Metro system, have been affected, which has delayed many daily commuters in the region.
New York City’s mass transit system has said that their bus and train operations were not affected by the outage, though some customer systems did go offline momentarily from the outage.
Thousands of Flights Have Been Canceled
The outage has hit airports around the world, which has caused thousands of flights to be delayed or canceled. As a result, thousands of travelers have been stranded in airports.
Though airlines are now coming back online, it has been a slow process. Many airlines have warned that it will take a bit of time before they will be able to fix everything.
