Very Sadly: IT outage disrupts banks, media, and airlines, causing mayhem. About three days ago….

An IT outage disrupts banks, media, and airlines, causing mayhem About three days ago

Reporting from London, Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull said, “CrowdStrike seems to have had some sort of mandatory update to its software that went horribly wrong.”

The company had reported that the issue was related to its Falcon sensor product, engineers identifying a “content deployment problem”, said Hull.

“Essentially it happens as you’re sitting in front of your terminal. If your terminal is a Microsoft Windows terminal, it suddenly goes to a blank blue screen. It’s called the ‘blue screen of death’ error. You are locked out of your operating system,” Hull said.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Friday that the outage was not a “security or cyber incident”.

“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” he wrote on X.

“As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.”

Microsoft said on Friday that the “underlying cause” of the global outage had been “fixed”, but the “residual impact” was continuing to affect some Office 365 apps and services.