Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

News

Faulty CrowdStrike Update Causes Global BSOD Outage, Impacting Airlines and Broadcasters

Faulty CrowdStrike Update Causes Global BSOD Outage, Impacting Airlines and Broadcasters
Faulty CrowdStrike Update Causes Global BSOD Outage, Impacting Airlines and Broadcasters

Numerous companies globally, including airlines and broadcasters, have been disrupted by a massive Microsoft Windows BSOD (blue screen of death) outage. This widespread problem arose from a faulty update by the security firm CrowdStrike, which caused PCs and servers to enter an unrecoverable boot loop.

Though the problematic update has been rolled back and some services, such as airlines and hospitals, began to recover by midday in the US, many systems remain impacted.

CrowdStrike acknowledged the issue in a Reddit post, noting widespread BSOD reports on Windows hosts across various sensor versions. They identified the cause as a content deployment issue and have since reverted the changes.

CrowdStrike provided a workaround involving booting Windows into Safe Mode and removing a specific driver. CEO George Kurtz apologized for the disruption on the Today show, expressing regret for the global impact caused.

The outage had significant repercussions, grounding flights for airlines such as Delta and Frontier, and affecting UK broadcaster Sky and the London Stock Exchange. Thousands of US flights were canceled, with FlightAware reporting over 2,500 cancellations by mid-afternoon. Although recovery efforts were underway, the process was slow and incomplete.

Faulty CrowdStrike Update Causes Global BSOD Outage, Impacting Airlines and Broadcasters

Faulty CrowdStrike Update Causes Global BSOD Outage, Impacting Airlines and Broadcasters

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg instructed airlines to treat the situation as a self-inflicted failure, meaning they had to cover costs for affected travelers, prompting a policy reversal from United Airlines.

IT professionals worldwide faced challenges in addressing the widespread disruption. Many Reddit users, including IT managers from countries like Australia, Malaysia, and Japan, shared their struggles. One user likened the situation to a catastrophic event, with half of their organization down due to the BSOD loop. Others described the difficulty of assisting non-technical users in booting their machines into Safe Mode to apply the workaround.

The issue also affected US court systems, leading to postponed cases, including Harvey Weinstein’s trial, and disrupted hospital operations, delaying surgeries and other medical procedures. CrowdStrike’s key product, Falcon, which provides real-time threat protection, was likely the cause of the incident.

Compounding the problem, Microsoft faced a separate outage with its Azure services and Microsoft 365 apps, further complicating the situation for affected users. CrowdStrike CEO confirmed the problem was due to a defect in a content update, not a security incident or cyberattack, and stated that a fix had been deployed, although it was unclear if this would resolve issues for machines already in a boot loop.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You May Also Like

Tech

Threads is experimenting with a new feature that allows users to set a 24-hour timer on their posts. After this period, the post and...

News

AU10TIX, an Israeli company that verifies IDs for clients like TikTok, X, and Uber, accidentally left important admin credentials exposed for over a year....

Tech

A team of international researchers has developed Live2Diff, an AI system that transforms live video streams into stylized content in near real-time. Named for...

News

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has voiced dissatisfaction with recent changes to Tron’s native stablecoin, USDD. He reacted to a report indicating that...