Microsoft is scrambling to fix the ‘massive cyber event’ that caused computer meltdowns around the world on Friday.
Described as the ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’, the outage has hit supermarkets, banks, telcos, streaming services and PCs.
Brits woke up to find Microsoft software and hardware affected, with airports, railways and GP surgeries also among those reporting problems.
It’s all due to a ‘buggy’ security update to Falcon, a type of antivirus software that protects Microsoft Windows devices from cyberattacks.
CrowdStrike – the company behind Falcon – is ‘actively working with customers’ who are affected, but insists it is ‘not a security incident or cyberattack’.
On Friday, computers around the world started repeatedly crashing and displaying the ‘blue screen of death.
While Australia was the first to feel the brunt of the outage, the US, UK and Europe are experiencing the chaos too, with Sky News and CBBC unable to broadcast live in the morning.
Departure boards at Gatwick and Edinburgh airports suddenly turned off, while NHS staff have described logging on to find non-clinical systems are down, meaning patients can’t book appointments.
Manchester United and Blackburn Rovers football clubs even tweeted to say its online ticketing system is experiencing disruption, the latter describing it ‘out of our control’.
US IT provider CrowdStrike admitted it was due to a defect in the ‘content update’ for its Falcon anti-virus software which crashed Microsoft Windows devices.
CrowdStrike has said a ‘fix has been deployed’ for the issue – but this could take days to manifest, so problems with Windows computers could be ongoing.
The near global outage appears to have been caused by a failure of systems associated with the CrowdStrike Falcon endpoint security monitoring software,’ explained Dr Mark Gregory, associate professor at RMIT University’s School of Engineering.
‘CrowdStrike is a global multi-national software solutions provider.
‘Many businesses and organisations have found that their software systems have failed due to the software system outage.
‘The reliance on centrally managed global software solutions can lead to significant security risks.’
IS IT A CYBERATTACK?
Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, agreed it was likely a ‘technical fault’ from CrowdStrike, but said we can’t rule out a cyberattack behind the scenes.
‘At this moment it is more likely to be a huge technical fault but the fact it is possible is extremely worrying,’ Moore told MailOnline.
‘If anything, it would make threat actors take note of this particular outage and the potential damage it can cause.’
Professor Jill Slay, chair in cybersecurity at the University of South Australia, said at this stage it is ‘too early to draw conclusions’, but that an attack is not impossible.
While the outage may easily be a result of misconfiguration by one of these companies, or “interference” between products, the global impact is enormous,’ she said.
‘It is possible that there is a security breach, but to me, this is instinctively unlikely.’
Cyber expert Troy Hunt told Seven News the catastrophic crisis was not affecting all Microsoft Windows computers, but many of them.
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