Major IT outages have hit industries across the world; almost 1,400 flights are cancelled and banking, healthcare and shops affected.
Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike says a “defect” in one of its software updates hit Windows operating systems
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” the firm says in a statement
The majority of GP surgeries in England are experiencing issues, the NHS says, with trains, shops and pharmacies in the UK also hit.
Many passengers with flights to, from or within the UK have rights when delays occur.
Tesla and X boss Elon Musk on his X handle described the IT outage as “Biggest IT fail ever.”
However, Microsoft says the “underlying cause” of the mass IT outage has been fixed for its apps, but “residual impact” is continuing to affect some services.
The company previously said the issue was due to “an update from a third-party software platform” – which has now been confirmed as Crowdstrike.
Many passengers with flights to, from or within the UK have rights when delays occur.
But Cyber-security experts warned that, although there is now a software fix, it’s going to take a huge amount of work to get computers back up and running.
Crowdstrike’s bad software causes systems to “blue screen” and crash, which means they can’t restart to get the good update on to computers.
Researcher Kevin Beaumont says: “As systems no longer start, impacted systems will need to be started in ‘Safe Mode’, to remove the faulty update.
“This is incredibly time-consuming and will take organisations days to do at scale. Essentially we have one of the world’s highest impact IT incidents caused by a cyber-security vendor.”
