Microsoft Outage, Outrage, And Outcome: How A 'Cyber Pandemic' Paralysed The World

Have you turned it off and on again? This popular IT Crowd phrase echoed in workspaces across the world on Friday as a global tech outage grounded flights, knocked media outlets offline, and disrupted hospitals, small businesses, and government offices. A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to have triggered the meltdown mainly in Microsoft’s cloud services and related apps, accentuating the fragility of a digitised world dependent on just a handful of providers.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s customers and that a fix was being deployed.

Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been fixed.

Chaos And Confusion

Thousands of flights were cancelled and tens of thousands were delayed around the world, leading to long lines at airports in India, other parts of Asia, Europe, and America. Airlines lost access to check-in and booking services in the heart of the summer travel season. IndiGo, SpiceJet, and Akasa saw disruptions in their online check-in and boarding processes across their networks, forcing them to switch to manual mode.

In a post on X, union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the reason for this outage had been identified and updates had been released to resolve the issue.

In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports posted on X by medical officials said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters, was taken off the air and apologised for being unable to transmit live.

Across the US, state troopers were reporting that 911 lines were down. The Paris Olympics organising committee also said it had been hit by the outage, but that it had contingency plans in place. People across Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere reported problems logging into their accounts at major retail banks.

The Culprit: CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor Update

CrowdStrike is a US-based American cybersecurity firm that helps companies manage their security in “IT environments” — that is, everything they use an internet connection to access.

Its primary function is to protect companies and stop data breaches, ransomware, and cyberattacks.

One of the company’s main products is CrowdStrike Falcon sensor, which is a key component of CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection platform. The software is installed on devices to provide real-time protection from cyber threats.

The main functions of the sensor include detecting threats, gathering data about devices, endpoint protection, and sharing data with the CrowdStrike cloud for further processing.

CrowdStrike Falcon is used by thousands of companies across the world to protect data, and a crash of its server on Friday is believed to be the cause of a global outage of Microsoft products and BSOD issues.

The Blue Screen of Death is known as a blue screen, fatal error, or bug check, and is officially known as a stop error.

CrowdStrike assured that this was not a security incident or cyberattack which many feared. The outage was due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”, it wrote on its support page.

Company boss Kurtz warned that although a fix had been deployed, “it could be some time” before all systems were back up and running.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, told Reuters. “I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale.”

(With agency inputs)