The head of the cybersecurity company publicly apologized but warned that a full recovery could take weeks.
Businesses and services around the world Major technical outage It has caused upheaval around the world and raised questions about the fragility of our globally interconnected economy.
A faulty software update caused an “unprecedented” outage on Friday, cancelling flights, crippling financial companies and news organisations and disrupting hospitals, supermarkets, small businesses and government agencies.
Some services were back online by Saturday, but George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, the US cybersecurity firm whose failed Falcon Sensor software update affected Microsoft’s Windows operating system, warned that a full restoration could take weeks.
CrowdStrike said it had released a fix for the issue, and Kurtz said he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group, every individual that was impacted” by the widespread glitch.
In a statement, the White House said US President Joe Biden’s team was in discussions with CrowdStrike and those affected and “standby to provide assistance as needed.”
“Our understanding is that air travel has resumed nationwide, although some congestion remains,” a senior U.S. administration official said.
Junad Ali, from the UK’s Institute of Engineering and Technology, told AFP that the scale of the blackout was “unprecedented and will undoubtedly go down in history”, adding that the last incident of anything close to this scale was in 2017.
“This shows we’re becoming more and more dependent on computers,” said Toby Walsh, lead scientist at the University of New South Wales’ Artificial Intelligence Institute.
“The irony, of course, is that the internet was designed as a nuclear-weapon-proof communications network, but it clearly is not,” he told Al Jazeera.
In Europe, major airports including in the German capital Berlin, which suspended all flights on Friday, said departures and arrivals were gradually resuming.
But dozens of flights across Europe were cancelled: Turkish Airlines announced 84 cancellations, while Italian authorities confirmed around 80 departures had been cancelled.
Airports across Latin America were asking passengers to arrive to their flights several hours earlier than usual.
Chinese state media said Beijing’s airport was not affected.
Companies were left scrambling to repair their systems and assess the damage, even as authorities tried to rule out any possible foul play and quell panic.
The turmoil has “exposed the fragility of the economy and the volatility of markets,” said Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloumi, reporting from New York.
“The system is recovering. It may take more time to sort out the impact on the public,” she added.
Other experts say the incident should prompt a broader rethinking of how dependent society is on a handful of tech companies for these services.
“We need to recognise that this kind of software can be a common cause of failure of multiple systems simultaneously,” said Professor John McDiarmid of the University of York, UK, an expert in cybersecurity and software engineering.
Infrastructure should be designed “to be resilient against these common cause problems,” he told AFP.
There was no security or cyber incident today. Our customers are fully protected.
We understand the seriousness of this situation and apologize for any inconvenience or trouble caused. We are working with all affected customers to ensure that systems are restored and that you…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
“We expect to see even bigger problems, especially on Monday, as people return to work and discover the ‘Blue Screen of Death,'” Walsh said.
One analyst said Friday’s incident was damaging for CrowdStrike, but that he didn’t expect competitors to gain significant market share as a result of it.
“This is obviously a big blemish on CrowdStrike and the stock price will fall,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said, but told Reuters the incident was due to a technology update and not a hack or cybersecurity threat, calling the latter “more concerning.”
CrowdStrike shares fell more than 11% on Friday, according to Reuters. The company, which has a market capitalization of about $83 billion to date, is one of the world’s most popular cybersecurity providers, with about 30,000 subscribers worldwide.
