A global Microsoft outage impacted users across the globe Friday morning, with hundreds of flights grounded, customers unable to use their banking and television broadcasts going dark. In Canada, TD Bank, RBC and Scotiabank are reportedly facing issues, with customers posting to social media they can't access their funds or make deposits.. Flights worldwide have been affected, with about one in 25 planes grounded, the Independent reported, as have railways, national health systems, television broadcast networks, and global delivery companies like FedEx.The Microsoft outage, which has now been widely referred to online as the "digital pandemic," could stretch on for days, according to the Daily Mail. In the UK, lawmakers held an emergency COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms) meeting to address what was called the "most serious IT outage the world has ever seen," the publication reported. .The unprecedented IT failure is linked to cyber security provider CrowdStrike, which issued a faulty software update that jammed the Windows operating system. Millions of people faced a blue screen, the sign of a crashed computer, and were unable to reboot their devices. .In a status update to users, Microsoft said the problematic software change was pushed via Falcon out to devices, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We’re aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud PCs caused by a recent update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software,” Microsoft wrote on Twitter (“X”). Microsoft warned the bug could cause computers to “get stuck in a restarting state.” The company blamed the failure on a “third-party software provider” and said it was being addressed. .CrowdStrike said the bug is “not a security incident or cyberattack.” .CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed the problem stemmed from the faulty software update and a solution has already been arranged. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a Twitter post. "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. 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.” . “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said, per the New York Post. It appears despite the “fix being deployed,” individual users will have to manually uninstall drivers to bypass the issues created by the bug in order to download the said “fix.”“As you might imagine, we’ve been on with our customers all night,” said Kurtz.“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up operational because we fixed it on our end.”“It could be some time. Sometimes, some systems won’t automatically recover … we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.”
A global Microsoft outage impacted users across the globe Friday morning, with hundreds of flights grounded, customers unable to use their banking and television broadcasts going dark. In Canada, TD Bank, RBC and Scotiabank are reportedly facing issues, with customers posting to social media they can't access their funds or make deposits.. Flights worldwide have been affected, with about one in 25 planes grounded, the Independent reported, as have railways, national health systems, television broadcast networks, and global delivery companies like FedEx.The Microsoft outage, which has now been widely referred to online as the "digital pandemic," could stretch on for days, according to the Daily Mail. In the UK, lawmakers held an emergency COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms) meeting to address what was called the "most serious IT outage the world has ever seen," the publication reported. .The unprecedented IT failure is linked to cyber security provider CrowdStrike, which issued a faulty software update that jammed the Windows operating system. Millions of people faced a blue screen, the sign of a crashed computer, and were unable to reboot their devices. .In a status update to users, Microsoft said the problematic software change was pushed via Falcon out to devices, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We’re aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud PCs caused by a recent update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software,” Microsoft wrote on Twitter (“X”). Microsoft warned the bug could cause computers to “get stuck in a restarting state.” The company blamed the failure on a “third-party software provider” and said it was being addressed. .CrowdStrike said the bug is “not a security incident or cyberattack.” .CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed the problem stemmed from the faulty software update and a solution has already been arranged. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a Twitter post. "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. 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.” . “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said, per the New York Post. It appears despite the “fix being deployed,” individual users will have to manually uninstall drivers to bypass the issues created by the bug in order to download the said “fix.”“As you might imagine, we’ve been on with our customers all night,” said Kurtz.“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up operational because we fixed it on our end.”“It could be some time. Sometimes, some systems won’t automatically recover … we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.”
