Airlines, airports, retail outlets, banks, railway companies and hospitals in several parts of the world were affected Friday morning in what appeared to be an unprecedented internet disruption.
The major internet outage affecting Microsoft, which disrupted flights worldwide, continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Internet security consultant Chris Hamer visited The Morning Show studio on Friday to explain how the outage happened.
“This is just a straight-up, ‘Oops!’” he said. “It was inadvertent. They pushed out a patch, and the patch had a flaw in it, and the flaw, unfortunately, is at one of those critical junctures when the system boots that it just can’t deal with it and crashes.”
The chief executive of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company at the heart of the outage emphasized in a social media post that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said a fix was being deployed to a defect sent out in a Windows update.
Kurtz said there was a defect in a “single content update for Windows hosts.” Mac and Linux hosts weren’t affected.
“It highlights are interdependency on other third-party providers,” Hamer said of the worldwide disruptions. “We rely on certain people to provide very niche or specialized applications, and when it fails, we don’t have adequate backups in place or the capacity to recover quickly.”
Hamer said the widespread outage highlights the vulnerabilities of our more advanced technological society.
“Our dependence on technology is what has brought us to this point where it takes just the smallest component to fail and we’re at a loss,” he said.
CrowdStrike referred customers to its support portal for updates.
A recording playing on CrowdStrike’s customer service line said, “CrowdStrike is aware of the reports of crashes on Microsoft ports related to the Falcon sensor.” It attributed the problems to one of its products used to block online attacks. It said callers should monitor its customer support portal.