Global IT outage could take weeks to fully resolve

Many companies will probably take days or even weeks to recover fully from Friday’s global IT outage, experts have warned. They also point out that cybercriminals are currently taking advantage of the chaos. The technical failure, caused by a flawed software update from cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, affected about 8.5 million Windows devices.

“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one per cent of all Windows machines,” Microsoft said on Saturday in a blog post. “While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.” ​

The technical failure caused problems in numerous sectors worldwide. Airlines grounded flights or warned passengers to expect long delays and there were service disruptions at amongst others emergency services, medical centres, government offices, media companies, factories, supermarkets and banks.

The outages were all the more shocking because of CrowdStrike’s function as many companies’ first line of defence against cyber attacks, analysts told the British newspaper The Financial Times. “This is the first time that a widely deployed security agent, designed to protect machines, is actually causing them to break,” said Neil MacDonald, an analyst at IT consultancy Gartner.

Windows users affected by the “blue screen of death” error need to reboot their computer and manually delete the botched update, requiring hands-on access to each device. That means it could take weeks to resolve the problem in some companies.

Phishing scams

Experts warn that cyber criminals in the meantime are taking advantage of the chaos to impersonate Microsoft or CrowdStrike agents for phishing scams. These criminals target individuals and organisations looking for information and solutions. They spread infected links under the guise of updates or solutions to CrowdStrike-related problems.

Avoiding the type of error that caused Friday’s outages was “a matter of testing”, according to Ian Batten, a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. In this case, it looked like someone simply “got a bit of code wrong”, he told The Financial Times. Companies like CrowdStrike are under pressure to introduce new security updates as quickly as possible to defend against the latest cyber-attacks.

^{A critical error in CrowdStrike's software update caused a blue screen of death on Windows computers around the world © BELGA PHOTO CFOTO/Sipa USA}