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The outage has caused disruption for millions
Today, an IT malfunction of unprecedented scale has sent shockwaves across the world, affecting critical services and impacting millions of people.
Elon Musk, tweeting this morning, has labeled the event as the “biggest IT fail ever.”
The cause of the huge outage lies in a software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The company uses a cloud-based system that offers companies security over the internet, rather than local installations. It provides companies with real-time insights into security threats.
A defect in the company’s latest update triggered a chain reaction, impacting Windows operating systems globally, meaning that many systems, including Teams and Outlook, went down.
CrowdStrike president George Kurtz said that the issue has been caused by “a single content update for Windows hosts”.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers,” he wrote on X.
Despite this, the residual impact and full recovery is expected to take several days, with many companies around the world being forced to restart their machines in safe mode.
The company was quick to stress that the event was not malicious in nature. Despite acting like a cyberattack in many ways, the fault did not compromise the integrity of any users’ data.
The ripple effects of this glitch have been far-reaching and are still arising. Nearly 1,400 flights have been canceled due to system failures, banks are struggling with transaction processing issues, as well as the broadcasting, retail and healthcare industries, amongst others.
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