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Global Cyber Outage grounds flights, hits banks, telecom, media and caused millions to experience Microsoft's 'Blue Screen of Death'

1 cover Crowdstrike

It's being reported that a fault with an update issued by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to a cascade effect among global IT systems Friday, with industries ranging from banking to airlines facing outages.

Banks and health care providers saw their services disrupted and TV broadcasters went offline as businesses worldwide grappled with the ongoing outage. Air travel has been hit hard, too, with planes grounded and services delayed.

At the heart of the issue is Texas-based cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike. On Friday, the cybersecurity firm experienced a major disruption following an issue with a software update.

What is CrowdStrike and what does it do?

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity vendor that develops software to help companies detect and block hacks. It is used by many of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies.

CrowdStrike is what’s known as an “endpoint security” firm as it uses cloud technology to apply cyber protections to devices that are connected to the internet.

This differs from alternative approaches used by other cyber firms, which involve applying protection directly to backend server systems.

What happened on Friday?

On Friday, people around the world began encountering an error screen known as the “blue screen of death.”

This issue — a common problem among PCs, for example if a machine overheats — was the result of an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike concerning its Falcon product.

Falcon is a platform developed by the company that’s designed to stop cyber breaches using cloud technology — it is at the heart of the firm’s focus on endpoints. CrowdStrike said Friday it is in the process of rolling back the update globally.

CrowdStrike’s software requires deep access to a computer’s operating system to scan for threats. In the case of Friday’s outage, machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system crashed due to a fault in the way a software update issued by CrowdStrike interacted with Windows.

“We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD [blue screen of death]) and get stuck in a restarting state. We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July,” Microsoft said in an update at 5:40 a.m. ET.

“We can confirm the affected update has been pulled by CrowdStrike. Customers that are continuing to experience issues should reach out to CrowdStrike for additional assistance,” the company added.

Earlier, Microsoft said its cloud services had been restored after an outage that affected its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the central U.S. region. A company spokesperson said these are two different and non-related issues — one issue relates to Azure, the other is linked to CrowdStrike.

For more, read the full CNBC report and their secondary report titled " CrowdStrike issue causes major outage affecting businesses around the world." A third report from CNBC on this matter is titled "Microsoft users hit with ‘blue screen of death’ after massive outage."

For the record, many Patently Apple fans have emailed us to say that our tweets aren't being received this morning.

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