Major Microsoft and Crowdstrike disruptions ground planes

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz posted on X on Friday that the fault had been identified and “a fix has been deployed,” adding that it wasn’t a cyberattack. Compounding the issue, Microsoft also reported an apparently unrelated problem with its Azure cloud service. 

There have been few outages of this scale in the past few years. CrowdStrike customers posted blue error screens to social media as they were prevented from accessing laptops and corporate computers. The cascading failures underscored how a growing proportion of businesses have moved services and support processes online in recent years, seeking to cut costs or better unify global operations. 

“This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”

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McDonald’s Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc., and the LSE Group were among the major companies to disclose issues from communications to customer service. KLM said it was suspending most flights because of a global computer outage. They were among the more prominent global corporations to report issues with their operations. 

Microsoft said that it was “aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform,” and also that it was working to restore Azure services “as quickly as possible.” 

The outages weighed on several sectors, including airlines, insurers and stock exchange operators. Shares in CrowdStrike sank 20%, while Microsoft fell 2.9%.

In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service — which, like Azure, underpins many of the world’s online platforms — disrupted the operation of tens of thousands of websites including ESPN.com. 

In June 2021, issues at content delivery network Fastly took out the New York Times, Reddit, Bloomberg News and UK government services among others for about a day. Later that year, issues at Amazon’s AWS cloud service resulted in visitors to Walt Disney Co. theme parks not being able to check in online, Ticketmaster postponing Adele ticket sales and no one swiping on Tinder.

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and creator of the hack-checking website Have I Been Pwned, said in a post on social media platform X.

Australia’s AGL Energy Ltd. said in a post on X it was currently experiencing system issues due to a CrowdStrike outage. Crowdstrike shares fell as much as 14% in initial premarket trading after reports of the outage.

The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday, and have been blamed on the failure of Microsoft services Azure and 365, the company’s internet-based office software suite. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded flights for over two hours. The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started resuming flights from 11 p.m. New York time.

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