Sources: euractiv.com & cnbc.com
According to an alert sent by Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash. The alert, sent at 0530 GMT on Thursday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue. “The glitch is due to CrowdStrike’s EDR product software update. This is a product that runs with high privileges that protect endpoints. As we are seeing in the current incident, a malfunction in this can cause the operating system to crash,” Omer Grossman, CIO at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said in an emailed comment. “It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed – the Blue Screen of Death – they cannot be updated remotely, and this problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days,” he added. Windows PCs involuntarily started to shut down on Friday afternoon, and attempts to restart them were met with a “blue screen of death” telling users that Windows could not load. Omer Grossman, CIO at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said the damage caused by this outage will be “dramatic.” “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” CEO George Kurtz said in a statement on X. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.
The travel industry was among the most brutal hit, with airports worldwide, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, and several Spanish airports, reporting system problems and delays. American, Delta, United Airlines, Ryanair, and Allegiant Air grounded flights, citing communication problems. The order came shortly after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers, though it was not immediately clear whether those were related.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, and Sky News was off-air, apologizing for being unable to transmit live. The London Stock Exchange was furthermore affected. German finance company Allianz and the Visa company were also affected. Banks and other financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa warned clients about disruptions to their services. At the same time, LSEG Group reported an outage of its data and news platform Workspace.
Amazon’s AWS cloud service provider said in a statement that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”
What is CrowdStrike?
It is a US-based cybersecurity firm that helps companies manage their security in “IT environments”—that is, everything they use an internet connection to access. Its primary function is to protect companies and prevent data breaches, ransomware, and cyber attacks.
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