As if the world isn’t currently facing enough problems, what with the economy floating around at the bottom of the toilet bowl, we’re now in the throes of a massive outage that could cause some major problems with banks all over the globe. Of course, the immediate question that pops into mind when reading anything about tech issues on such a large scale is whether or not we’re under a cyberattack. As of now, the answer to that question is no.
A report published by CNBC said that financial services and doctors’ offices experienced severe disruptions on Friday, while there were many TV broadcasters who ended up offline as businesses all over the place were forced to grapple with the massive IT outage. One of the industries hardest hit by this issue is air travel. Planes have been grounded. Services have been postponed. Airlines are now being forced to advise their customers concerning changes to their travel plans. It’s chaos everywhere.
Earlier on Friday, cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike experienced a major disruption, the company told NBC, following an issue with its latest tech update.
The company’s CEO George Kurtz has since said that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” stressing that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said on social media. One expert suggested it may be the “largest IT outage in history.”
The cloud services being offered by Microsoft were finally restored after the outage, the company stated on Friday, despite the fact there were many users still reporting issues. Shares of the CrowdStrike company fell about 9 percent as of noon Friday.
A report from CNN Business revealed that for those companies in possession of hundreds and even thousands of laptops, desktops, and servers that are running CrowdStrike’s security software, an individual worker might end up having to perform the process multiple times, as it cannot be automated. This, of course, is going to cost a whole lot of money as companies are now going to have to pay workers for additional hours due to time being wasted performing the process for this over and over.
“You can’t automate that,” said Kevin Beaumont, a security researcher and former Microsoft threat analyst, in a post on X. “So this is going to be incredibly painful for CrowdStrike customers.”
On Friday, a Microsoft status pagereported that some Windows Virtual Machine users have successfully recovered from the issue by repeatedly rebooting, in some situations up to 15 times in a row.
“We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage,” Microsoft commented on the page. There has been no explanation as to why this particular technique works.
This is one of the biggest issues with living in a technological society. Everything going digital might be convenient, but problems like this are good reminders that to become completely dependent on tech is a bad idea.
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