Thousands of Windows devices “died out of the blue” on Friday morning at banks, airlines, TV stations, supermarkets and other businesses around the world, as a result of which flights had to be canceled, stores became inoperable and, overall, life stopped in many ways.
As it turned out, the widespread outage that disrupted businesses was caused by a faulty update by security firm CrowdStrike, and contrary to fears, it was not a deliberate malicious action or series of attacks. Based on feedback from IT administrators, entire company systems went offline.
The problem directly affected Windows systems around the world. The well-known BSOD error screen appeared on thousands of laptops, terminals, and vending machines when starting the system, and it was not possible to get rid of it or get the device to work even with a restart.
According to CrowdStrike’s information, the global phenomenon was connected to the Falcon Sensor application for preventing attacks against computer systems, or more precisely, the situation was caused by a problematic file arriving with its latest update – the company has not yet shared more technical details in this regard.
Although the update has since been recalled by CrowdStrike, devices stuck in the loop after the restart have not yet been recovered everywhere. The company shared a workaround method, the manual implementation of which is likely to take considerable time in the case of companies with huge device parks. Microsoft has also been involved in the recovery process, but it may take several more hours to restore services.
The shutdown caused delays at several airports, including Berlin and several airports in Spain. The London stock market is struggling with disruptions, Sky News was unable to broadcast. The Ryanair airline warned its passengers about possible disruptions, but according to Downdetector, Delta Airlines, Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, BT, and even Microsoft Teams were also affected.
The reservation system of the British general practitioner service and the drug logistics systems are also not working properly, the emergency lines in America have also become unreachable, and operations had to be postponed in some hospitals.
According to Lauren Wills-Dixon, a data protection expert at Gordons law firm, the situation highlights, among other things, how much trust organizations place in certain technologies and companies, and the current chaos is the result of modern society and technological addiction.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
