This has been termed Major IT outages hitting industries across the world, with airlines, banking, shops and healthcare affected.
Reports gathered from media outlets shows Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm with thousands of customers globally, admitted on Friday that a defective software update had caused the major IT outage that is bringing airports, banks, hospitals, media outlets, and businesses to a halt worldwide.
Reports of outages began streaming in from around the globe early on Friday, with broadcaster Sky News in the UK forced off the air for several hours.
Travellers faced widespread disruption with airlines cancelling flights and airports struggling to cope with system failures and delays.
But from what is gathered from other sources, this is might seem extreme that a piece of cyber-security software can cause such a huge amount of damage – but these products are, by their nature, deeply ingrained in the innards of a computer network.
They have “god-like” access to all the inner workings of an IT system for obvious reasons.
These “End Point Protection” programmes have to be able to monitor the inner workings of computers to search for abnormalities that might be malicious software, or hackers poking around inside databases. Says Joe Tidy Cyber correspondent of BBC
‘Biggest IT fail ever’ says Muskpublished
We’ve just brought you two posts from our experts on the nature and scale of the worldwide IT outage.
But on X, Tesla and X boss Elon Musk has tried to sum it up more succinctly.
“Biggest IT fail ever,” he says.
Cyber Secuirity experts are also warning that although there is now a software fix, it’s going to take a huge amount of work to get computers back up and running. As this is reportedly not a software update issue as reported by the company.
