Global outage disrupts airlines, stock markets, and banks
News agencies reported on Friday that a global Microsoft system outage caused disruptions and problems in many industries, including aviation, finance, media, and railways. However, as Piotr Konieczny from the service Niebezpiecznik.pl told WP, we are actually dealing with not one but two serious outages.
The massive cyber system outage grounded planes in Australia, the USA, and caused chaos at airports such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, and Amsterdam. It also affected the London Stock Exchange. Some companies in Poland were also impacted: it paralyzed the Baltic Hub container terminal, and customers of PKO BP and Santander banks had trouble accessing their accounts.
What happened? Is Microsoft really responsible for this global outage, or is it the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which admitted to releasing a faulty patch for its software?
- Two different outages have been conflated in media reports. The problem Microsoft experienced started a few hours earlier and concerned its cloud services. The company acknowledged that users are having trouble accessing these services, knows the cause, is restarting servers, and will be able to use them shortly - said Piotr Konieczny from Niebezpiecznik.pl in an interview with WP. - Was the issue with these servers caused by the fact that they had CrowdStrike software on them? Such information has not been provided - he added.
Programmer error
- The second outage, which some are already linking to various conspiracy theories, concerns an update to CrowdStrike's advanced antivirus program. Simply put, a programmer made an error in the code, causing the computers using this program to be unable to boot correctly and become temporarily unusable - explained the expert.
Konieczny explains that the system cannot boot on its own to download an update that fixes the error and self-repair. - Such a system must be manually put into safe mode, the faulty file located and removed, but not everyone can do this as it requires administrative privileges that regular users in companies do not have - said Piotr Konieczny.
After the overnight outage at Microsoft and the server restart, most users are able to use their hardware and cloud services without issues.
The expert explained that the problem only affects users of the CrowdStrike software, which is quite expensive and installed to increase system security.
