Worldwide, computers are saying no. GPs can’t access appointments and medical records, banking apps have been knocked offline, flights are grounded, laptops won’t work. Technology across Europe and America has been toppled by what appears to be a glitch in a software update for some popular anti-virus software from a company called CrowdStrike. ‘Biggest IT fail ever,’ tweeted Elon Musk.
‘CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,’ George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, said in a statement this morning. ‘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.’
The trouble is that the damage is already done. In the US, Delta Airlines has paused all of its flights. The Royal Surrey NHS Foundation has cancelled cancer treatments. Morrisons and Waitrose are having payment problems. Belfast airport is using whiteboards to display departure times. Schoolcomms, a logistics app used by 3,000 schools, is reporting issues. We could go on. In CrowdStrike’s most recent accounts, the company reported having 24,000 commercial customers. Each is an organisation. The scale of the failure is huge.
Government minister Pat McFadden has said that Britain is coordinating its response through the ‘COBR response system’, usually reserved for dealing with terror attacks and natural disasters. While some systems are slowly coming back online – good news, the Washington, D.C. metro is reportedly running smoothly again – it will take time to fix individual laptops and computers. CrowdStrike’s ‘fix’ seems to require the manual attention of a technician on every affected device, of which there will be many, many thousands.
CrowdStrike has also lost 21 per cent of its stock value in pre-market trading – a fall of $16 billion. It will take some time to find a fix for that, too.
This piece first appeared in the Lunchtime Espresso email. Sign up here.
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