Why is the internet down? What to know about the global Microsoft outage linked to CrowdStrike

An unprecedented global IT outage caused worldwide chaos on Friday morning, leaving passengers stranded at airports, TV networks unable to broadcast and banks unable to serve their customers.

Major cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike issued a faulty software update that slammed users of Microsofts Windows operating system, many of whom were greeted with crashing computers and the so-called blue screen of death as they were left unable to restart.

Were aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud PCs caused by a recent update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software, Microsoft said on its 365 Status X account.

Microsoft warned the bug could cause computers to get stuck in a restarting state.

In an appearance on NBCs Today show, Kurtz said CrowdStrike was deeply sorry for the outage.

Computers from the US to Europe, China and beyond were impacted by what is already considered one of the largest IT outages in history.

This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time, prominent cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was the result of a flubbed software update and that a fix had been deployed. Separately, Microsoft blamed the outage on a third-party software provider and said it was being addressed.

CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, Kurtz said in a lengthy X post. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.

The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers, Kurtz added.

CrowdStrike has yet to provide many specifics. CrowdStrike reportedly warned customers the issue was related to Falcon, a service that scans company devices for hacking attempts and other cybersecurity threats.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Austin-based company told customers in a status update that the problem was with a software change it had pushed via Falcon out to clients computers.

The company said its engineers had undone the change but clients would need to use a workaround to download a fix to affected computers.

CrowdStrike said the outage is not a security incident or cyberattack. Instead, it resulted from a bug in a software change it pushed to clients.

Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft have signaled a fix is already underway, though its unclear when full service will be restored across the various industries affected by the glitch.

CEO Kurtz couldnt give a timeline for when all systems would be back up and running again.

As you might imagine, weve been on with our customers all night, he said. Many of the customers are rebooting the system and its coming up operational because we fixed it on our end.

It could be some time, he added. Sometimes, some systems wont automatically recover were not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.

According to the Journal, some affected users may be back up and running soon but for others it could take weeks depending on the system in use, said Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Defused.

The fix CrowdStrike has given is quite manual and may be difficult, in some cases, to deploy at large scale, he told the paper.

US airports were jam-packed with stranded passengers as the software glitch caused flight cancellations and delays. American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines were among those that grounded flights. Europes Ryanair said it was experiencing issues due to a global 3rd party system outage.

The MTAadvised New York commutersthat its customer IT systems were temporarily offline due to the technical outage, but train and bus services were still running.

Banks and other financial services firms in Germany, Australia, India and various other countries warned customers of service outages, while traders were reportedly left unable to execute transactions.

Bank of America, Visa, TD Bank, Wells Fargo and many other banks were having issues as of Friday morning, according to DownDetector.

UK-based Sky News was left unable to broadcast morning coverage and said it was working hard to restore all services. News outlets in Australia also experienced issues with going live.

With Post wires