On the morning of Friday, July 19th, CrowdStrike customers experienced a major digital blackout as outages hit banks, hospitals, airports, and other services worldwide. Businesses scrambled to mitigate the effects of the sudden disruption, implement plans, rely on backup systems, and maintain operations to provide customer service.
Worldwide, Microsoft users reported being knocked offline from their devices. Microsoft reported to its users and the public that their closely integrated cybersecurity partner, CrowdStrike, was to blame due to a malfunctioned software update. Microsoft stated, “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” Customers using Mac software with CrowdStrike security systems were not affected during this outage.
Within the first 16 hours of the outage, Downdetector, a website that tracks reported outages, recorded over 311,000 global Microsoft outages. The majority of reports were from the United States and the United Kingdom, with a significant impact on larger systems.
The most significant systems affected were in airports, with almost 3,000 flights being canceled. Over 4,000 flights to and from the U.S. experienced delays. Major U.S. carriers offered travel waivers to their affected customers as a large portion of their operations were grounded.
9-1-1 systems and phone lines were down in Alaska and Ohio. Throughout Europe, the British National Health Service (NHS) reported that doctors’ appointments and patient records were affected. In Germany, all non-emergency operations were suspended.
While Crowdstrike developers were able to fix the malfunction by midday Friday, the strain on larger operating systems was too significant for an immediate fix. As a result, many airlines experienced IT outages throughout the weekend, leading to frequent delays and a lack of customer support. The scale of the CrowdStrike outage is considered the largest of this century, illustrating society’s dependence on technology in this era.
By Justin Goldberg