Financial services and doctors’ offices were disrupted on Friday, while TV broadcasters went offline as businesses worldwide grappled with an ongoing major IT outage.
Air travel has been particularly hit, with planes grounded, services delayed and airports issuing advice to passengers.
Earlier on Friday, cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike experienced a major disruption, the company told NBC, following an issue with its latest tech update.
The company’s CEO George Kurtz has since said that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” stressing that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said on social media.
Separately, Microsoft cloud services were restored after an outage, the company said on Friday, even as many users continued to report issues.
Shares of both companies were losing ground in premarket trading on Friday morning.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised Friday for the systems update that caused a global IT outage, telling NBC “we’re deeply sorry.”
Businesses are still reeling, with many flights grounded and payments systems downed after the cybersecurity giant’s antivirus software update went awry.
“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” he told NBC’s “Today”.
The CEO reiterated that it was not a security incident or cyberattack, and that the company is working with customers to get them back online.
He said the update was normal and part of the firm’s routine process to prevent security risks. However, he noted that a thorough investigation would need to be carried out into what went wrong.
“We have to go back and see what happened here. But if there’s a negative interaction with the way some of these operating systems work — in this particular case, it was, it was only a Microsoft operating system that was impacted — you’ll see a reaction like this,” he said.
– Karen Gilchrest
