Global chaos as Microsoft and CrowdStrike face dual system outages
A global Microsoft system outage caused disruptions and problems in many industries, including aviation, finance, media, and railways, news agencies reported on Friday. However, as Piotr Konieczny from the service niebezpiecznik.pl told WP, in reality, we are dealing with not one, but two serious outages.
The massive cyber system outage grounded planes in Australia and the USA, caused chaos at airports in cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and affected the London Stock Exchange.
What happened? Is Microsoft responsible for this global outage, or is it the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which admitted to releasing a faulty patch for its software?
Media reports have conflated two different outages. Microsoft's problem started a few hours earlier and concerned its cloud services. The company acknowledged that users are having trouble accessing these services, knows the cause, and is restarting servers. Was the issue with these servers caused by the fact that they had CrowdStrike software on them? Such information has not been provided, he added.
Programmer error
The second outage, which some already link to various conspiracy theories, concerns an update to CrowdStrike's advanced antivirus program. Simply put, a programmer made an error in the code, causing the computers using this programme to be unable to boot correctly and become temporarily unusable.
The experts explain that the system cannot boot on its own to download an update that fixes the error and self-repair. It has to be manually put into safe mode, and the faulty file has to be located and removed. Not everyone can do this, as it requires administrative privileges that regular company users do not have.
After the overnight outage at Microsoft and the restart of the server, most users can use their hardware and cloud services without issues.
The problem now only affects users of the CrowdStrike software, which is quite expensive and installed to increase system security.
