CrowdStrike major outage affects businesses around the world in unprecedented scale

AFP | Paris

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Airlines, banks, TV channels and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil yesterday by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.

Air passengers crowded into airports to wait for news as dozens of flights were cancelled and operators struggled to keep services on track, after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed the system.

Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running cybersecurity software CrowdStrike Falcon.

CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem and the firm’s boss, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologise to every organisation, every group and every person who has been impacted”.

US President Joe Biden’s team was talking to CrowdStrike and those affected by the glitch “and is standing by to provide assistance as needed”, the White House said in a statement.

Full impact

Reports from the Netherlands and Britain suggested health services may have been affected by the disruption, meaning the full impact might not yet be known.

Media companies were also struggling, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had ended its morning news broadcasts and Australia’s ABC similarly reporting major difficulties.

Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, supermarkets in Australia had problems with payments, mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.

Unprecedented

“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017. Experts suggested it could take days or weeks for systems to be patched up.

Shares in Crowd Strike slumped by nine percent in early trading in New York. From Amsterdam to Zurich, Singapore to Hong Kong, airport operators flagged technical issues that were disrupting their services. While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff had to check-in passengers manually.

Grounded

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially ordered all flights grounded “regardless of destination”, though airlines said they were re-establishing their services. But AFP footage showed frustrated and stranded passengers in airports from Milwaukee Mitchell to New York LaGuardia.

In Europe, major airports including Berlin, which had suspended all flights earlier yesterday, said departures and arrivals were gradually resuming.