On Friday, 19th July 2024, the world witnessed a massive technological outage that disrupted businesses, governments, airports, and multiple other sectors across the globe. The havoc was caused by an update rolled out by one of the famous Cybersecurity Firm CrowdStrike which caused all the personal and business machines powered by Microsoft Windows to crash, lighting the screens with blue color with an error message.
Jonah Hill, from Al Jazeera, while reporting from London, said, “CrowdStrike seems to have had some sort of mandatory update to its software that went horribly wrong.” Jonah also stated that the issue was primarily related to the company’s Falcon Sensor Product, as the engineers have identified a “content deployment problem.”
“Essentially, it happens as you’re sitting in front of your terminal. If your terminal is a Microsoft Windows terminal, it suddenly goes to a blank blue screen. It’s called the ‘blue screen of death’ error. You are locked out of your operating system,” Hull said.
George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, said in response to this outrage that it was a cyberattack.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” he wrote on X.
This global tech disruption highlights the fragility of a digitalised world, which solely rely on one or two big IT companies. The chaos was a result of a software update released by a cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, which only impacted the computers powered by Microsoft Windows, the world’s number one operating system for personal and business computers. According to the company, it was not a malicious attack or hacking attempt, it was just a release bug, which the firm apologized for and said they are fixing the issue on an urgent basis.
Government agencies and businesses around the world experienced disruption for many hours, their monitor screens were glowing blue with error messages and they all scrambled to deal with the situation. CrowdStrike’s CEO said that some of the sophisticated systems will require manual fixes, which will be a time-consuming task.
Airports lost their access to check-in and booking services when the summer traveling season was at its peak. However, by afternoon Eastern time, the situation appeared to have normalized, although there were still cancellations and delays in the flights due to the aftermath of global tech disruption.
Many local news and media outlets across the impacted countries were not able to air the news early Friday while governments reported problems at courts, motor vehicle departments, emergency call centers, and more, but as the day went on, most of the systems were back to operations. Like the other industries, healthcare was also badly impacted; hospitals had to cancel appointments, suspend patient visits, and reschedule some surgeries. However, no major loss was reported.
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