Slow recovery after CrowdStrike update causes global IT outages | Technology news

Businesses and services around the world were slowly recovering after a massive technology outage wreaked havoc around the world and raised questions about the vulnerability of the interconnected global economy.

A botched software update caused the unprecedented outage on Friday, disrupting flights, bringing down financial and media companies, and disrupting hospitals, supermarkets, small businesses and government offices.

By Saturday, some services were back online, but George Kurtz, CEO of US cyber security company CrowdStrike, whose botched Falcon Sensor software update hit Microsoft's Windows operating system, warned that a full recovery could take up to week.

CrowdStrike said it had issued a fix for the problem, and Kurtz said it wanted to personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person affected by the widespread flaw.

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he warned in a statement. I encourage everyone to stay vigilant and ensure that you engage with official CrowdStrike representatives.

US President Joe Biden's team was speaking with CrowdStrike and those affected and was standing by to provide assistance as needed, the White House said in a statement.

Our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although there is still some gridlock, a senior US administration official said.

Junade Ali of the British Institute of Engineering and Technology said the scale of the outage was unprecedented and would no doubt go down in history, telling AFP news agency that the last incident on the same scale was in 2017.

This shows our increasing dependence on computers, said Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of New South Wales.

The irony, of course, is that the Internet was designed to be a nuclear-proof communications network. It is clear that this is not the case at all, he told Al Jazeera.

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

However, dozens of European flights were canceled. Turkish Airlines said it had withdrawn 84 flights and Italian officials confirmed that around 80 departures had been cancelled.

Across Latin America, airports asked passengers to arrive for flights hours earlier than usual.

Chinese state media said Beijing's airports were not affected.

Companies were left patching their systems and trying to assess the damage, even as officials tried to contain the panic by ruling out foul play.

The outage exposed a vulnerability in the economy and the volatility of markets, said Al Jazeera's Kristen Saloomey, reporting from New York.

Systems are being restored. Sorting out the consequences for ordinary people could take longer, she added.

Other experts said the incident should prompt a broad re-examination of how dependent societies are on a handful of technology companies for such a set of services.

We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of failure for multiple systems at the same time, said Professor John McDermid of Britain's University of York, an expert in cyber security and engineering. the software.

He told AFP that infrastructure must be designed to be resilient to such common cause problems.

Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.

We understand the gravity of the situation and are very sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all affected customers to ensure systems are restored and they can

George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024

Walsh said: We can expect there to be even more problems, especially when people go back to work on Monday and discover the blue screen of death.

One analyst said that while Friday's events were damaging to CrowdStrike, he did not foresee competitors taking much market share as a result of the incident.

This is definitely a big black eye for CrowdStrike and the stock will be under pressure, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, but he told the Reuters news agency that the incident stemmed from a technical update and not a hack or threat. for cyber security. which he said would be more troubling.

CrowdStrikes shares fell more than 11 percent on Friday, Reuters reported. The company, which previously achieved a market cap of about $83 billion, is among the world's most popular cybersecurity providers, with close to 30,000 subscribers worldwide.