A major global IT outage hit businesses around the world on Friday, grounding airlines and knocking media companies off air.
In Ireland, Ryanair was advising customers travelling on Friday to get to the airport earlier, and check in at the airport rather than through their apps. In the UK, trains, health services and airlines were affected by the IT issue. Sky News was temporarily off the air, although it later resumed broadcasting - with the outage the top story throughout the morning. Emergency services in Alaska were impacted by the problem.
DownDetector, a website that tracks outages, was practically melting under the strain.
In short: global chaos.
What happened?
Late on Thursday, reports began to emerge in Australia and the US that people were experiencing were some issues with Microsoft’s cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service that is used by businesses across the globe, and its office software suite Microsoft 365.
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Shortly afterwards, some users also reported the “blue screen of death” on computers, preventing them accessing systems or being able to reboot.
Initially, there were fears that a well-coordinated cyber attack was to blame for the problems, given the range and breadth of the targets. But it seems that the problem was more mundane.
What happens now?
Given the widespread nature of the problem, there is likely to be scrutiny on the dominance of a handful of companies in the tech sector. With so many services taken down with a single update, it is inevitable that people will start to question the wisdom of the current dependence on cloud services.
What is the problem?
There are two issues at play here. First, the Azure issue, which started on Thursday night. The company’s cloud services, including Microsoft 365, were affected for many customers as a result.
But then came the “blue screen of death”, linked to global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. Microsoft’s Azure unit said it was aware of an issue that impacted virtual machines running the Windows OS and the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, getting stuck rebooting. “We recommend customers that are able to, to restore from a backup from before this time,” Microsoft’s status update page said.
A software upgrade to CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, which is designed to identify and block threats to IT services, seems to be at the root of the problem.
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CrowdStrike has yet to issue a statement publicly, but messages accessible to customers indicate the company is aware of the problem and has engineers working on the issue. “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,” the message reads. “Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.”
Crowdstrike also ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.
So it appears to be two separate problems and a case of unfortunate timing.
Is it fixed?
Hopefully. The Azure problem has been sorted by Microsoft, and Microsoft 365 services are showing as “up and running”. On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said the problem was caused by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
There may still be some delays for customers however, as companies deal with the knock-on effect of the outage.
Who is Crowdstrike?
You might be familiar with the name; the company was one of those who helped investigate the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee, along with the connection to Russian intelligence services. CrowdStrike is a US-based global cybersecurity company that offers threat intelligence, monitoring systems to detect intrusions and deal with them.
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