Latest Updates from Cybersecurity Companies Crowdstrike A major IT outage occurred on Friday, affecting businesses around the world.
CrowdStrike told NBC it was rolling back the update that caused the issues and that it had since deployed a fix for the flaw.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by the flaw found in the single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected,” CEO George Kurtz said. X Statement .
“This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
He added that customers should refer to the support portal for the latest updates and work with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.
Kurtz apologized to those affected in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show early Friday morning.
“Firstly, I would like to apologise deeply for the impact this has had on our customers, travellers and all those affected, including our own company,” he said.
“An update was sent to the system, but that update had a software bug that caused issues with Microsoft’s operating system. We are currently working with all customers to help them get back online.”
Kurtz added that the update was normal and part of the company’s normal operations to prevent security risks, but noted that an investigation is needed to determine what went wrong.
The confirmation comes after widespread reports of technical issues, many of which Microsoft Users around the world are experiencing an error screen known as the “Blue Screen of Death.”
CrowdStrike shares fell about 11% on Friday, while Microsoft shares were little changed.
“Massive power outage”
Airlines, hospitals and financial services companies Among the many businesses affected.
American Airlines Air France, which describes itself as the world’s largest, said the technical issues were affecting “several airlines” including American Airlines, while the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM said it had been “forced to suspend the majority” of its operations.
In the UK, the Royal Surrey Hospital “Emergency” Radiotherapy had to be temporarily halted, while England’s National Health Service said it was disrupting the majority of its doctors’ practices.
Banks and finance companies around the world have reported problems, with German insurance giant Allianz saying it was “experiencing a major outage affecting employees logging into their computers. This has affected several other companies in addition to Allianz.”
NBCUniversal was also affected by the CrowdStrike outage.
For the latest information on affected companies, please click here.
‘Unprecedented’
Satnam Narang, a senior researcher at Tenable, told CNBC on Friday that the outage had a “significant impact” and was unprecedented in its scale and scope.
“The challenge here is that because security software is in its role to protect the organization, it has to have more privileged access to these machines,” he said.
“So while people may see this as a Windows glitch, they’re just seeing a little blue screen pop up, and it’s actually not a Windows issue, it’s more to do with incomplete or improper updates to security software.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s unprecedented,” Narang added.
Omar Grossman, chief information officer at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said the impact of the outage would be “enormous.”
“The issue is due to a software update to CrowdStrike’s EDR product, which runs with elevated privileges to protect endpoints. When this fails, as seen in this incident, it can cause the operating system to crash,” he said in an emailed statement.
Getting back online won’t be easy, Grossman said.
“We discovered that because the endpoints were crashing (blue screen), they could not be updated remotely and would have to be fixed manually on each endpoint. We expect this process to take several days,” he added.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
