After massive IT outage for airlines and health care, officials see signs of recovery (2024)

FAQs

What did the CrowdStrike outage affect? ›

CrowdStrike IT outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft says. Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage. It's the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.

The massive disruption to Microsoft systems has included flight delays and cancellations, as well as impacting hospitals, banks, supermarkets and millions of businesses.

The Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is a critical error screen on Windows PCs that halts all operations and displays an error message. This occurs when the system encounters a severe issue, often leading to an unexpected restart and potential data loss.

CrowdStrike shares are falling more than 4% in premarket trading, extending Friday's large declines, after the cybersecurity firm's software update caused a global outage in Microsoft's cloud services.

The Defense Department tops a list of 16 agencies reporting a total of nearly $55 million in unclassified purchases of CrowdStrike cyber protection software — cited as the cause of the largest global computer outage following a failed update last week.

Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been fixed. "We're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company," Kurtz told NBC News' "Today" programme.

The blue screen of death is usually caused by improperly installed, damaged, or aging hardware, or by buggy or incompatible software. Driver updates for your graphics card or other hardware components can also cause a blue screen of death if they fail to integrate properly with the rest of your system.

The company provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices, and many industries globally — from banking to retail to health care — use the company's software to protect against breaches and hackers.

In an earlier social media post, Microsoft said users can fix the blue screen of death by restoring their Windows 365 Cloud PC "to a known good state prior to the release of the update, or replacing the buggy version of Windows 365 with the system in use just before CloudStrike issued its faulty update.

How bad is the blue screen of death? ›

Officially called the stop screen, or stop error, the blue screen of death (BSOD) is a most unwanted error, second only to malware or ransomware in indicating that a user is in for a very bad day. It comes with no warning and all unsaved work is immediately lost.

Ways to fix a blue screen of death

To fix a BSoD, you need to restart your computer in the safe mode and uninstall any recently added drivers or applications (in today's case, the CrowdStrike update file). You then need to run diagnostic tests on your hardware components to identify and replace any faulty parts.

Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage caused worldwide IT disruption after software update, impacting sectors like healthcare and banking. Patches were launched to resolve issues but required manual reboots. This is the biggest outage since Amazon in 2017 and Fastly in 2021.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 (Reuters) - Security experts said CrowdStrike's (CRWD.O) , opens new tab routine update of its widely used cybersecurity software, which caused clients' computer systems to crash globally on Friday, apparently did not undergo adequate quality checks before it was deployed.

Microsoft has estimated that the incident, which is being described as one of the worst IT outages in history, impacted 8.5m computers around the world.

CrowdStrike shares tumbled in morning trading, after a software update from the cybersecurity company caused widespread outages for millions of users of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide.