Did you turn it off and on again? That popular IT Crowd phrase rang out in workplaces around the world on Friday as a global technical outage grounded flights, knocked media offline, and disrupted hospitals, small businesses, and government offices. A software update from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to have caused the meltdown, primarily affecting Microsoft’s cloud services and related apps, underscoring the fragility of a digitized world reliant on just a handful of providers.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that impacted Microsoft customers and that a fix was being worked on.

Microsoft reported later on Friday that the issue had been resolved.

Chaos and confusion

Thousands of flights were cancelled and tens of thousands were delayed across the world, leading to long queues at airports in India, other parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Airlines lost access to check-in and booking services in the middle of the summer season. IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa saw disruptions to their online check-in and boarding processes across their networks, forcing them to switch to manual mode.

In a post on X, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the cause of the outage had been identified and updates had been rolled out to fix the issue.

In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple medical officials reported on X. Sky News, one of the country’s largest news channels, was taken off air and apologized for not being able to broadcast live.

In the U.S., state troopers reported that 911 lines were down. The Paris Olympics organizing committee also said it had been affected by the outage but had contingency plans in place. People in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere reported problems logging into their accounts at major retail banks.

The Culprit: CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor Update

CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity company based in the US that helps companies manage their security in “IT environments,” meaning anything they can access via an internet connection.

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Its main function is to protect businesses and stop data breaches, ransomware and cyber attacks.

One of the company’s key products is CrowdStrike Falcon sensor, a key component of CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection platform. The software is installed on devices to provide real-time protection against cyber threats.

The sensor’s main functions are threat detection, device data collection, endpoint security, and sharing data with the CrowdStrike cloud for further processing.

CrowdStrike Falcon is used by thousands of companies worldwide to protect data. A server crash on Friday is believed to have caused a global outage of Microsoft products and BSOD issues.

The Blue Screen of Death is known as a blue screen, fatal error, or bugcheck and is officially known as a stop error.

CrowdStrike assured that this was not a security incident or cyberattack that many feared. The outage was due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” it wrote on its support page.

Company CEO Kurtz warned that while a fix had been implemented, it “could still be some time” before all systems were operational again.

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“This is a very, very uncomfortable example of the vulnerability of the core infrastructure of the world’s internet,” Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of Britain’s National Cyber ​​Security Centre, told Reuters. “I can hardly imagine a failure of this scale.”

(With input from the agency)

Its main function is to protect businesses and stop data breaches, ransomware and cyber attacks.

One of the company’s key products is CrowdStrike Falcon sensor, a key component of CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection platform. The software is installed on devices to provide real-time protection against cyber threats.

The sensor’s main functions are threat detection, device data collection, endpoint security, and sharing data with the CrowdStrike cloud for further processing.

CrowdStrike Falcon is used by thousands of companies worldwide to protect data. A server crash on Friday is believed to have caused a global outage of Microsoft products and BSOD issues.

The Blue Screen of Death is known as a blue screen, fatal error, or bugcheck and is officially known as a stop error.

CrowdStrike assured that this was not a security incident or cyberattack that many feared. The outage was due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” it wrote on its support page.

Company CEO Kurtz warned that while a fix had been implemented, it “could still be some time” before all systems were operational again.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable example of the vulnerability of the core infrastructure of the world’s internet,” Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of Britain’s National Cyber ​​Security Centre, told Reuters. “I can hardly imagine a failure of this scale.”

(With input from the agency)