CrowdStrike suffers major outage affecting businesses around the world

An update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a major outage on Friday, the company told NBC, which impacted businesses globally.

CrowdStrike said it is now in the process of rolling back the update that caused the issue. The outage is not believed to be a result of a hack or any malicious action.

The confirmation came after widespread reports of technical issues across the world.

Microsoft said earlier on Friday that its cloud services had been mostly restored after it suffered an outage affecting its cloud apps in the U.S. It is not clear whether this outage was linked to CrowdStrike’s update.

However, separately, the update issue at CrowdStrike appears to have directly affected Windows systems around the world, with laptops showing an error screen known as the “blue screen of death.”

“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,” CrowdStrike said in a recorded phone message.

Airlines, banks, telecom firms and banks were among the many businesses that reported issues Friday, although it was not immediately clear what was causing each issue.

American Airlines, which describes itself as the world’s largest, said a technology issue was affecting “multiple carriers,” while the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM said it had been “forced to suspend most” of its operations.

Spain’s airport authority AENA, meanwhile, warned travelers to expect delays due to an “incident in the computer system,” and U.K. airline Ryanair said it was experiencing disruption as a result of a third-party IT outage. It advised passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their scheduled departure time.

Beyond the travel sector, banks and financial companies around the world have reported issues, with the London Stock Exchange reporting technical issues with its data and news platform.

German finance giant Allianz said it was “experiencing a major outage that is impacting employees ability to log into their computers. It impacts multiple companies besides Allianz, specifically affecting the Windows login and is caused by an incident at our provider CrowdStrike.”

A Visa spokesperson said that although its ability to process payments does not appear to be affected, “we are aware of reports of people being unable to make payments and are working with our financial institution clients to understand any impact on their services to cardholders and merchants.”

NBC Universal is also being affected by the CrowdStrike outage.

See the latest updates on which companies are affected here.

Omer Grossman, CIO at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said the damage caused by this outage will be “dramatic.”

“The glitch is due to a software update of CrowdStrike’s EDR product. This is a product that runs with high privileges that protects endpoints. A malfunction in this can, as we are seeing in the current incident, cause the operating system to crash,” he said in an emailed comment.

Getting back online is unlikely to be easy, according to Grossman.

“It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed – the Blue Screen of Death – they cannot be updated remotely and this the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days,” he added.

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