Airlines, hospitals, banks and a host of other businesses and services have just started to recover slowly on Friday from the massive disruptions following global technology outage. However, problems kept cascading throughout the day by affecting package delivery, hospitals, courthouses and various other sectors worldwide.
According to reports, the meltdown resulted from a software update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by myriad industries around the world. The disruption that reached what some experts called “historic” proportions was an amazing reminder of how certain software that we depend on can be fragile in its effect on global economy and how it can cascade when things go wrong.
CrowdStrike’s software update caused machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system to crash. George Kurtz, the CEO of this company said it wasn’t even security incident or cyber-attack. A fix had been issued for it but he warned that it would take some time to complete the process. “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused,” he said.
Major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines grounded flights early on in Friday while there were delays and interruptions at other carriers and airports around the globe. Banks from Australia up to India Germany alerted their customers about possible disruptions while traders across markets spoke out candidly about transaction execution problems.
“This is mother of all global market outages,” according to one trader.
Multiple reports posted by medical officials on X indicated that booking systems used by doctors in Britain were offline as Sky News one of its major news broadcasters went off air too.
Manchester United FC announced postponement of planned ticket release.
Passengers are being manually checked-in causing delays at Los Angeles Airport as well as Singapore Changi, Hong Kong International Schiphol Amsterdam Airport and Berlin Airport among others due to some airline affected ones. Some Dutch ministry sources revealed it also hit government agencies like foreign ministries in Dubai& Netherlands
On top of having firms bring back services after resolving glitches , experts warned about dangers prevalent in today’s online world. “This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, ex-head of UK’s national cyber security centre. NYT & Reuters.
