On Friday, July 19, a worldwide tech outage struck industries from travel to finance.
Services started coming back online after hours of disruption, highlighting the risks of a global shift towards digital, interconnected technologies.
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to have triggered the problems.
Services all around the world were affected, grounding flights, forcing some broadcasters off air, and leaving customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.
- Tech Boom Leads Global Markets in First Semester of 2024
- Microsoft asks some China staff to relocate amid Sino-US tensions
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s customers, and that a fix was being deployed.
Success
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Success
Check your email to complete sign up
Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been fixed.
Kurtz told NBC News’ “Today” programme: “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company”.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz said. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover.”
Experts said the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre.
“I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale,” he added.
Disruption
Major U.S. airlines like American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines, grounded flights, while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.
Banks and financial services companies from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions, and traders across markets spoke of problems executing transactions.
“We are having the mother of all global market outages,” one trader said.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters, was taken off air and apologized for being unable to transmit live.
Airports from Los Angeles to Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Berlin said some airlines were having to check in passengers manually, causing delays.
Government agencies were also affected with the Dutch and United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministries reporting some disruptions.
As the day progressed, more and more companies reported a return to normal service.
LSEG Group also said its data and services were back up and running after an outage that caused some disruption across financial markets.
Still, industry experts weighed the potential impact for the sector of what one called the biggest ever IT outage.
Ajay Unni, CEO of StickmanCyber, one of Australia’s largest cybersecurity services companies, said “IT security tools are all designed to ensure that companies can continue to operate in the worst-case scenario of a data breach, so to be the root cause of a global IT outage is an unmitigated disaster” .
CrowdStrike is a U.S.-based company, with a market value of about $83 billion and it is among leading cybersecurity players, counting more than 20,000 subscribers around the world.
Reuters contributed to this report.
