CrowdSrike-Microsoft outage | Top 5 things to know

Basic details about how the microsoft crowdstrike outage happened, who was affected and why it happened.

Early on Friday, a massive IT crash impacted almost all sectors globally, including aviation, public transport, stock markets and banks, corporates, media broadcasting and hospitality, with Windows systems everywhere throwing up the Blue Screen of Death error. Cybersecurity experts called it the biggest IT outage in history.

Airports globally from Singapore to Melbourne were affected by drastic delays and sudden cancellations with planes being temporarily grounded. A FlightAware tracker stated that over 21,000 flight delays had been reported. While United and Delta flights in the U.S. resumed later, disruptions could continue for several days since its peak travel season. 

In India, flights were majorly affected with many cancellations and airlines resorting to issuing handwritten boarding passes. The Reserve Bank India also reported smaller disruptions in 10 banks and NBFCs while hospitals also had to switch to manual processes, as stated by an ANI report. Indian stock markets remained unaffected.

A Bloomberg report said that doctors at UK’s National Health Service couldn’t access scans, blood tests and patient histories with other medical facilities like the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the Mass General Brigham in Boston reporting that their patient care had been impacted. 

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An issue with U.S. cybersecurity software company CrowdStrike led to the widespread global issue. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz clarified on Friday. A defect had been found in a single content update for Windows hosts which was attributed later to the Falcon Sensor product, he added. The issue had come down to a bug in a single update causing the cascading effect. 

CrowdStrike calls Falcon “the CrowdStrike platform purpose-built to stop breaches via a unified set of cloud-delivered technologies that prevent all types of attacks—including malware and much more.”