Today was the largest IT outage in history that effected businesses, organizations, and governments worldwide. Air travel was hit especially hard, with over 2,100 airline flights cancelled. Bankers from Hong Kong and Dubai to South Africa and London and Wall Street were unable to log on to computer systems and many from making trades. Doctors could not access their systems and had to turn people away. Some TV broadcasters were completely offline. People seeking to enter the U.S. from both the north and the south found that the border crossings were delayed for hours. 911 lines could not respond to emergencies. Even the Starbucks mobile ordering system was down! The list goes on and on… So what happened?
CrowdStrike, a titan of the cybersecurity industry, sent out a flawed software update on Thursday to its users who run Microsoft Windows software. Almost immediately, computers began to crash. The issues began when Microsoft dealt with an outage on its cloud service system, Azure, which affected some airlines. And things began to devolve from there. CrowdStrike then sent an update for its software called Falcon Sensor, which scans a computer for intrusions and signs of hacking. If everything had gone according to plan, CrowdStrike’s software would have received minor improvements and customers would have hardly noticed. Instead, when CrowdStrike’s faulty update reached computers running Microsoft Windows, it caused the machines to shut down and then endlessly reboot. Workers around the world were greeted with what is known as the “blue screen of death” on their computers. As computers restarted themselves over and over, known as the “doom loop,” there was little CrowdStrike could do to fix the problem. Tech staff at affected companies were faced with a choice: walk around to each machine and remove the bit of flawed code, or wait and hope for a solution from CrowdStrike. Within several hours of the faulty software going out, CrowdStrike sent out a software patch as a fix that would stop computers from endlessly rebooting.
Unfortunately, CrowdStrike has a customer base that includes multinational corporations, government agencies and scores of other large organizations that use it’s software to protect against hackers and online intruders which is how this issue ground a number of essential institutions to a halt. Even our custodian Charles Schwab was affected for a good portion of the morning. Fortunately for all of their clients, they worked diligently and swiftly to get this problem resolved and you can rest assured no accounts were negatively affected or compromised.
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