As expected, CrowdStrike shares have fallen sharply on the American stock exchange after a computer failure hit Windows computers worldwide on a large scale. It went wrong with an update from the cybersecurity company. Before the market opened, the share price had already fallen by 20 percent. Investors fear huge claims for damages.
CrowdStrike President and CEO George Kurtz apologized for the impact of the global outages. “As you can imagine, we’ve been working with our customers all night. Many of the customers are rebooting their systems,” Kurtz told NBC.
Healthcare providers including the UK’s National Health Service and one of Europe’s largest health facilities in northern Germany were hit by IT problems. Banks, broadcasters and supermarkets in Australia, New Zealand and the UK were also affected.
The software is supposed to protect against cyber attacks, but the impact of the outage is much greater than any cyber attack has caused so far. Apparently, the update has not been tested sufficiently.
A disruption of this magnitude is unprecedented. In 1999, the millennium bug seemed to cause enormous problems. Distribution centers would no longer operate, planes would no longer take off and ATMs would be impossible at the bank. In the end, the problems caused by the millennium bug turned out to be very limited.
Source: www.emerce.nl
