A global technology outage disrupted banks, hospitals, airlines, emergency services, and media outlets on Friday, affecting companies and services worldwide, The Associated Press reported.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — the source of the sudden disruption — said that the reason for the outage is not a security or cyberattack. Rather, the culprit is a routine software update for Microsoft Windows gone wrong.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a statement, NPR reported. Mac and Linux operating system customers were not affected, the company claimed.
Services at airports in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, took a hit as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services, as travelers had to temporarily abandon their summer vacation plans to join long lines at airports. Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines all had to ground flights, NPR reported.
News outlets in Australia were pushed off air for hours. Banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages to their payment systems, websites and apps. Hospitals had issues with their appointment systems, AP News reported. And in some U.S. states including Alaska and Ohio, 911 phone lines were down.
Crashed computer screens displayed “it looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” messages on blue screen — which is sometimes called “blue screen of death,” NPR reported.
“This is clearly a major black eye for CrowdStrike,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told NPR.
Troy Hunt, a known cybersecurity researcher, labeled the technology disruption “the largest IT outage in history,” CNBC reported.
Since the debacle unfolded, CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz has said that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect fund in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he wrote on X.