Experts have warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover from a global outage which has seen disruption including flight delays and cancellations.
A flawed update rolled out by CrowdStrike, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers, knocked many offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling some healthcare systems.
Here is a closer look at what we know about the incident
What exactly has happened?
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz confirmed the issue was caused by a “defect in a single content update for Windows hosts” – in short, a flaw in a software “sensor configuration” update pushed out to customers. Experts have warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover from a global outage which has seen disruption including flight delays and cancellations.
A flawed update rolled out by CrowdStrike, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers, knocked many offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling some healthcare systems.
Here is a closer look at what we know about the incident
What exactly has happened?
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz confirmed the issue was caused by a “defect in a single content update for Windows hosts” – in short, a flaw in a software “sensor configuration” update pushed out to customers.
What is the scale of the impact?
Substantial – around the world, banks, supermarkets and other major institutions saw services disrupted, while many businesses were unable to take digital payments or access key databases.
NHS England said “the majority of GP practices” had experienced disruption and ambulance services reported increases in 999 and NHS 111 calls from patients who were unable to contact other NHS providers, while the National Pharmacy Association said pharmacies had seen issues “including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries”.
Airlines reported being unable to process passengers and resorted to manually checking in customers at airports around the world with 167 flights departing from the UK and 171 incoming cancelled on Friday. Aviation analytics company Cirium said 5,078 flights – or 4.6% of those scheduled – were cancelled globally.
Meanwhile in South Africa, aviation is among the sectors that are still assessing the impact of the digital outage that disrupted networks in many countries.
Global banking and logistics operations were affected. United Airlines, which operates daily flights from the united States to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Accra and Lagos, experienced service disruptions.
The airline was forced to issue a waiver to make it easier for customers to change their travel plans. Regional airline Airlink was also affected. Airlink CEO, Rodger Foster, says the airline was however quickly able to manage the situation.
“The global IT outage cause by Crowdstrike and Microsoft caused mayhem throughout the world airline industry with flights disruptions, especially in America and Europe. I am very pleased to say that at Airlink, we did not have any flight disruptions, we were able to mitigate, our IT department was able to save the day for us and keep our operational systems functional as well as our booking system available to our public. We did have some outages earlier in the morning until we were able to put the contingencies in place, but we did not suffer any major flight disruptions whatsoever.”