Multiple agencies around the world were affected by a global outage on July 19. Reports show that the outage was caused by a faulty software update.
The faulty update knocked banks and media outlets offline, disrupted small businesses, hospitals and other services. This disruption highlighted just how much the digitized world relies on a small number of providers, highlighting the fragility of it all.
The update was issued by CrowdStrike and affected computers running Microsoft Windows. Agencies at CrowdStriker apologized for the disruption and said a fix was in the works. They also tried easing customers' fears by telling them that it was not a cyberattack or a hacking incident.
However, hours later, the fix never surfaced and disruptions escalated. Airport passengers in the U.S., Asia and Europe were not able to check-in and couldn’t access booking services. Doctors’ offices and hospitals computers went down, leaving them unable to access their appointment systems, forcing them to cancel non-urgent surgeries and procedures. Many U.S. TV stations were affected and couldn’t air local news on Friday morning.
Several Olympic athletes were stuck in the airport fiasco, along with their uniforms and accreditations.
Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former Head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre said the disruption is a scary reminder of just how society relies on technology and would be crippled without it.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” Martin said.
Cyber expert James Bore said hospitals are affected the most by disruptions, since lives rely on technology.
“All of these systems are running the same software,” Bore said. “We’ve made all of these tools so widespread that when things inevitably go wrong — and they will, as we’ve seen — they go wrong at a huge scale.”
Microsoft took to social media to address the issue.
Frank X. Shaw sent out an email statement saying that “a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of Windows systems globally.”
CrowdStrike CEO George said the company was “deeply sorry for the impact” they caused to customers, travelers or anyone else affected by the disruption. He also said they were aware of the issue and trying to remedy it.