A software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally on Friday, grounding flights, forcing some broadcasters off air and hitting services from banking to healthcare nearly across the world.
The cyber outage was caused after an update to a product offered by global cyberscurity firm Crowd Strike, which apparently triggered the issue, affecting customers using Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.
Banks and financial services companies from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and traders across markets spoke of problems with executing transaction.
“We are having the mother of all global market outages,” one trader said.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports posted on X by medical officials said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters was off air, apologising for being unable to transmit live, and soccer club Manchester United said on X that it had to postpone a scheduled release of tickets.
In an alert to clients issued at 0530 GMT on Friday, Crowd Strike said its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”. It also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
Over half of Fortune 500 companies used Crowd Strike software, the US firm said in a promotional video this year. —AFP
