Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has disclosed that a global IT outage that has grounded activities was not a security incident or cyberattack.
On Friday, a Microsoft outage affected companies worldwide, with planes grounded and train services shut down. The service outage prevented users from accessing Microsoft cloud computing platforms and caused airlines to cancel flights. Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions, reported that thousands of users worldwide had problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Most of the downtimes were with OneDrive, server connections, and Outlook. This outage impacted Sky News in the UK, which could not broadcast live TV on Friday morning, and airlines in the US. The extent of the service disruption is not yet known, however, according to BusinessTech in South Africa, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange issued a notice stating that the FTSE indices are not updating.
Read also: How Microsoft configuration change caused global IT outage
According to news outlets in Australia, airlines, telecommunications providers, banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Airlines in India also reported problems, and some New Zealand banks reportedly went offline.
George Kurtz, president and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike, on X, noted that the outage was caused by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.
He tweeted, “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Microsoft highlighted that a configuration change in some Microsoft Azure backend workloads caused interruptions between storage and compute resources, resulted in connectivity failures and affected downstream Microsoft 365 services.
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