The world woke up Friday morning to the “Blue Screen of Death” as Microsoft and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported an outage.
CrowdStrike president and chief executive George Kurtz said the company was “actively working” with customers affected by the technology issue and that the “issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” as reported by Forbes.
Computers running Microsoft Windows are affected thanks to an outage blamed on CrowdStrike. Lingering issues through Friday’s workday forced grounding of flights at major airlines, put banking services offline and disrupted television.
According to the U.S. Emergency Alerts System, 911 lines were down in multiple states across the country.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that all major American airlines, such as United, American and Delta, had no choice but to temporarily ground all flights: a total of 1,281 flights. Nearly 3,000 flight delays were also reported, and as many as 3.7 million passengers were affected. Other airports, including Hong Kong International, Air India, KLM, Berlin Brandenburg Airport and London Stansted also reported disruptions in air travel which required manual check-ins and long lines for travelers.
Former U.K. National Cyber Security Centre Director Ciaran Martin told Forbes the trouble started where CrowdStrike and Windows are both needed.
“It’s a striking and very concerning illustration of the fragility of digital infrastructure,” Martin said.
The London Stock Exchange group was unable to publish statements during the outage, but the New York Stock Exchange was unaffected.
Although the issue has been fixed, companies around the world will have to take time to deploy the remedy.
Mike Kafka, Director of Corporate Communications & Public Relations for Sentara Health, said that the Harrisonburg-based health system does not use CrowdStrike, but is “closely monitoring the IT outage.”
“However, we are currently in the process of evaluating the impact on third-party providers and partner organizations who do work with this vendor. Normal operations remain in process at Sentara hospitals and facilities,” Kafka said.
Adam Pilton, Senior Cybersecrity Consultant at CyberSmart and former Detective Sergeant investigating cybercrime, said the situation “will impact our daily lives.”
No suggestion was made by CrowdStrike that the situation was created by a cyber attack, but Pilton said the connection between CrowdStrike and Microsoft may not have been a coincidence. “Time will tell whether these are directly related.”
“What we are seeing now though are the businesses which have business continuity and incident response plans in place. These businesses are effectively communicating the issues and ensuring their customers are informed,” Pilton said.
Society depends on technology, so technical and non-technical controls are necessary “to protect us when issues arise, whether malicious or not.”
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Rebecca Barnabi
