William Gallagher
The vast majority of corporate IT worldwide is struggling on Friday morning, with things as mundane as point-of-purchase, and as complex as flight management not working because of a bad Windows security patch by security firm CrowdStrike.
While the failure is confined to Windows systems, it's significantly worse than previous Microsoft outages, because of the scale. American Airlines, Delta, and United, each grounded all aircraft, according to BBC News, TV stations including MTV, VH1, CMT, Sky News, and ABC News Australia went off air.
What's directly affecting Apple users is that there are now reports of supermarkets around the world having problems accepting Apple Pay and other contactless payments. This will be because they are using Windows-based terminals, but it's not clear either how widespread this issue is, nor why it isn't affecting all users.
The outage was caused by a software update by security firm Crowdstrike. The company has issued a brief statement saying that it was one issue in an update, and that "this is not a security incident or cyberattack."
"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," continues the statement. "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted."
"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," says the company.
Crowdstrike has not given a timescale for when the fix will be adequately rolled out worldwide. At present, the issue is continuing, and at time of writing, Apple Pay has been seeing a spike in outages, presumably because of it.
Christine McKee
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
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68 Comments
Surprised something like this would get past testing (assuming testing was done).
A number of books have been written on the anticipated failure of complex systems, sometimes looking at telecommunications or power delivery.
So this is where we see letting third-party vendors have that level of access to the OS in order to provide security becomes a vulnerability in itself.
My scheduled video conference with HP has hit the skids. I was told at 8am this morning that IT support were working on the problem but I doubt they'll apply the machine-by-machine workaround offered by Crowdstrike which requires booting into Safe Mode and deleting a file.
It's touch and go for the meeting which is scheduled to start in 30 minutes.
It is more likely they'll wait for the fix from Crowdstrike to flush through the systems.
Global automated updates should be rolled out in phases to catch these glitches before they become wildfires.
I see some airlines still have boarding cards that can be handwritten for the lucky ones who have been able to get off the ground.
EDIT: meeting postponed.
No sooner are Labour in power… /s