After a Microsoft outage led to collapses in airlines, businesses and healthcare across the globe, IT professionals are working hard to bring life back to normal, while the cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike loses billions after admitting responsibility.
Taking the blame
The Texas-based company, CrowdStrike has taken the blame for the global Microsoft meltdown, caused by an update to its Falcon security software. Since admitting the blame, the company has lost billions of dollars in value as its CEO, George Kurtz made a public apology on American television.
Kurtz stated that the problem had been identified and a solution was being implemented, adding that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.” The CEO swore “to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we´re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
Still affected
More than 42,000 flights were delayed worldwide on Friday, July 19. As passengers spent their night stranded at the airport, millions were warned that they would miss their payday by the company representing payroll processors.
Not only airlines but healthcare workers are facing serious issues as pharmacists in the UK reported disruptions with medicine deliveries and accessing prescriptions.
In the US, America Brigham and Women´s Hospital in Boston had to cancel all scheduled surgeries and medical visits that were not considered “urgent” due to being unable to access vital digital records. “We do everything on our computers now,” said neuro ICU nurse Meghan Mahoney to the local Press. “People´s medical history, their allergies. So when that goes down, we have to revert back to paper charting.”
When will it resolve?
“Some systems may not fully recover, and we´re working individually with each and every customer to make sure we can get them up and running and operational,” said the CrowdStrike CEO. Kurtz did not provide a timeframe; a large number of companies across the globe are having to rely on their own IT departments to fix the systems.
The Chief Information Officer at identity security firm, CyberArk, Omer Grossman revealed to the Press that even with CrowdStrike addressing the issue, the problems are likely to take time to resolve. He noted that the collapse is related to Endpoint Detection and Response products that run on individual client computers.
“It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed – the Blue Screen of Death – they cannot be updated remotely and the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days.”
