A global IT outage has caused chaos at airports, banks, railways andbusinesses around the world as a wide range of services were taken offline and millions of people were affected.
In one of the most widespread IT crashes ever to hit companies and institutions globally, air transport ground to a halt, hospitals were affected and large numbers of workers were unable to access their computers. In the UK Sky News was taken off air temporarily and the NHS GP booking system was down.
Microsoft’s Windows service was at the centre of the outage, with experts linking the problem to a software update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that has affected computer systems around the world. Experts said the outage could take days from which to recover because every PC may have to be fixed manually.
Overnight, Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an issue with its services and apps, with the organisation’s service health website warning of “service degradation” that meant users may not be able to access many of the company’s most popular services, used by millions of business and people around the world.
Among the affected firms are Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, which said on its website: “Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage … We advise passengers to arrive at the airport three hours in advance of their flight to avoid any disruptions.”
Windows PC running Crowdstrike.
Shhh
The OS getting fully bricked because of a third party software update is still very much a OS level fuck up.
I've seen RHEL completely crap itself due to a 3rd party update. Wasn't that long ago fairly certain it was a McAfee update that took down a bunch of our Linux boxes. It happens.
My Debian system was bricked when it "upgraded" to systemd.
Required attaching a monitor to a normally headless server to fix. (Turns out systemd treats fstab differently and can hang booting if USB drive isn't attached.)
Steam, a 3rd party program, has nuked the home directory of users who didn't really do anything wrong.
Programs have huge abilities to bork systems, be it Windows or Linux...
Depends. Since this is security software it probably has a kernel driver component. I think in linux a 3rd party kernel module could do the same. But the community would not accept closed source security software, especially not in the kernel.
Except crowdstrike literally doesn't work like that on Linux.
They even have a version for Linux, which is a kernel module.
Has that been impacted by this?
No it has not. Validated on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 running CrowdStrike Sensor