On Friday 19th July, Microsoft’s Windows operating systems displayed errors, and consequently created mass impacts globally across many different industries. Reports of disruptions started flooding in from around the world, including in the UK, parts of Europe, Asia, and USA.
“The catastrophe illustrates the challenge of widely deployed software without IT controls, and the critical needs for a rock-solid backup and recovery plan to ensure resiliency against cyberattack, unintentional buggy code, and just about anything else.” says Ranjan Singh, Chief Product Officer of Kaseya.
The global outages have been linked to a software update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. It is believed the issues stem from a misconfigured/corrupted update that CrowdStrike pushed out to its customers.
Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.” This suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.
Many industries have suffered, with aviation being one of the worst hit. Flights have been grounded because of the IT outage – a flaw which left many computers displaying blue error screens. There were long queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports around the world, as passengers had to be manually checked in.
Ryanair said it had been “forced to cancel a small number of flights today (19 July)” and advised passengers to log-on to their Ryanair account, once it was back online, to see what their options are. British Airways also cancelled several flights.
Railway companies, including Britain’s biggest which runs Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern, warned passengers to expect delays. NHS England has confirmed that GP appointment and patient record systems have been affected by the outages. One hospital has declared a “critical” incident after a third-party IT system it used was impacted.
The outages could result in “millions” being lost by organisations impacted who have had to halt their operations or stop business. Overall, the impacts of the outages warn us of our dependence on tech, as well as the continuing significance of tech across global industries and services.