New Delhi: Computer systems around the world faced an outage on Friday (July 19) after a faulty software update was issued from US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, CNN reported.
The global outage affected services across sectors like banking, healthcare and aviation, with many airlines reporting delays and grounding of flights. Airline services in India were affected, with Air India, Akasa Air, Indigo and SpiceJet issuing advisories to passengers warning of delays, NDTV reported.
“Our systems across the network are impacted by an ongoing issue with Microsoft Azure, which has resulted in increased wait times at our contact centres and airports. You may experience slower check-ins and longer queues,” Indigo said in an advisory.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on X said that a defect was found in an update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems, which appears to have triggered the outages.
The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and is not impacting Mac or Linux operating systems, according to an advisory accessed by CNN.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack…The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz said in the post.
As many fortune 500 companies rely on CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, ripples of this faulty update and the resulting outage have been felt worldwide.
“This will be the largest IT outage in history,” said renowned security consultant Troy Hunt, adding that “this is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, told Reuters.
Services hit
Airports in Singapore, Hong Kong and India resorted to checking in passengers manually as a result of the outages, Reuters reported, while major US airlines including Delta, United and American Airlines issued ground stops on Friday citing communication issues.
The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today 😅 pic.twitter.com/xsdnq1Pgjr
— Akshay Kothari (@akothari) July 19, 2024
Advertisement
According to the report, banks and financial services companies in Australia, India, and Germany warned customers of disruptions, while traders in various markets reported difficulties in executing transactions.
Other apps that faced disruptions include: Microsoft 365, Microsoft Team, and Microsoft Azure.
