Friday was, somewhat busy and crazy if you work in IT!
You must know by now… there was a Global IT outage. Well, I say you must know – there was worldwide disruption to arilines…
Difficulty in paying for your shopping…
It was basically a faulty software update by a company called Crowdstrike, that caused the global IT outage which likely skipped checks before being deployed.
An estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows PCs devices were affected worldwide by the update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, causing delays for airports, broadcasters, hospitals and businesses.
Problems came to light quickly after the latest version of CrowdStrikes Falcon sensor software was rolled out on Friday.
The update was meant to make systems more secure against hacking, but instead caused devices to display a “blue screen of death” due to faulty code.
Shares in Crowdstrike fell, considerably. Not only them, airlines revealed a 46% fall in profit!
CrowdStrike told customers early Friday the outages were caused by “a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems,” according to a post on X from CEO George Kurtz. The issue was identified and isolated, and engineers deployed an update to fix the problem, Kurtz said.
I’ve been reading about it on various social media platforms. The one that really caught my eye was an engineer, up at 2am, who had a call come in about the Blue Screen Of Death… they, at the time thought it was an isolated incident, then all of a sudden, more calls started coming in and it got all serious. The good thing was, they’re kind of trained for situations like this – firstly, they focused on getting hospitals up…
But it really does make you think. How reliant we are on tech – and how one single content update caused worldwide disruption.
I’ve always said, and will always say – technology is wonderful. However, we should have back up systems or something in place if all goes wrong.
Below is the latest from Crowdstrike…
The last bit I wanted to say was – if you have a company reaching out that you’ve never heard of suggesting they can fix your computer system for you – don’t get scammed!
Efforts by CrowdStrike to make clients more secure against hacking attempts further backfired as malicious websites have begun to use the incident to publish “unofficial code” claiming to fix any ongoing issues, Australia’s cyber intelligence agency has warned.
On its website, the Australian Signals Directorate said its cybersecurity centre “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only”.
I talk alot a fair amount regarding cyber security – but in all honesty, make sure you listen to your IT team, official updates only and stay alert. These can be testing times as we’re so reliant on tech – well, not just us – but our customers, friends, etc… too.