Extraordinary IT Outage Hobbles Business Around the Globe

Bloomberg:  Computer systems failed across the globe on Friday, taking down services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange after a widely used cybersecurity program crashed and Microsoft Corp. separately reported problems with its cloud services.

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. warned customers on Friday that its Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring product was causing Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. It was unclear what triggered the issues, which coincided with disruptions of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services.

Microsoft Cloud Software Outage: Live Updates

“We’re aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.”

There have been few outages of this scale in the past few years. “This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”

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.

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 meant visitors to Walt Disney Co. theme parks couldn’t check in online, Ticketmaster postponed Adele ticket sales and no one was swiping on Tinder.

On Friday, McDonald’s Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc., and the LSE Group were among the major companies to disclose a variety of issues with 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.

“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.