IT outage turns the world upside down

July 19, 2024 67

A mass IT outage caused chaos around the world to major companies, including banks, media (TV and radio stations), airports and airlines.

According to reports, an update to an antivirus programme from a cybersecurity company affected Microsoft’s cloud services updates, causing the system to crash.

This is said to be one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years.

Social media went on a frenzy with people from around the world posting up pictures of their computers not working.

The outage also affected airports in Australia, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and the US, amongst others. Some of the affected airports had to ground flights.

Banks in Israel, the US, New Zealand, including South Africa’s Capitec Bank, and the London Stock Exchange were impacted, as well as telecoms companies and some retail stores.

Rail services were disrupted in parts of the US and the UK.

Emergency services (911) were also disrupted in several US states including Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

The outage was so big that even Sky News went off air.

However, services have now been restored to most of the affected organisations.

Phew! That was rough, but all of our services are now back up and running.⁰We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused. ⁰⁰

Thank you to our clients for your patience and understanding, we appreciate you. pic.twitter.com/f2tMt3YZOv

— Capitec (@CapitecBankSA) July 19, 2024

Some affected Yires shared their concerns over this, saying it was a huge inconvenience.

Cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, has also now confirmed that a cyberattack did not cause the global IT outage.

The company says a software update had a bug that hit the Microsoft operating system and has now been fixed.

CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…

— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024

People were posting from around the globe over this rare occurrence.

Windows Crashed…! It seems everyone around the globe facing this issue.. wahhhh please don’t resolve

Take ur own time#windows #bluescreen #Microsoft #crowdstrike

— Justin King (@JustinKing79206) July 19, 2024

IT departments in every company right now :#Microsoft #Windows #bluescreen #crowdstrike

— Mason White (@WhiteMason58529) July 19, 2024

The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today

— Thomas Clifford (@ThomasClif16648) July 19, 2024