More than 1 100 flights have been canceled worldwide due to a global technical failure at Microsoft, and this number continues to grow. There is collapse at airports.
This is reported by the BBC and CNN.
The outage affected not only airports — thousands of schools, banks, and postal services were affected, including the Ukrainian “Nova Post” company, the “Sense Bank” and the “Vodafone” mobile operator.
The head of the American anti-virus company CrowdStrike George Kurtz said that the problem, which caused a large-scale technical failure, was "identified, isolated and fixed."
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by the outage, he said. Kurtz claims that this is not a cyber attack — the incident was caused by a flaw discovered in an update to the CrowdStrike software for Windows.
CNN writes that the software was likely updated without proper prior testing.
At the same time, iOS and Linux users were not affected at all by the failure, as was Russia, which does not massively use the updated Microsoft software due to sanctions for the war against Ukraine.
After a massive technical failure, Microsoft shares fell by more than 20%. CrowdStrike lost $16 billion in market value. However, this is evidenced by the preliminary calculations of analysts. Officially, trading on the stock exchange in the USA has not yet started.
- CrowdStrike provides cyber security services. One of its main products is the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, which detects potential cyber security threats in real time and creates "automated protection" against attacks. In fact, it is an antivirus for corporate systems. The company sells its platform to large corporations such as Microsoft, government agencies worldwide, global banks, energy companies, and more.
- A large-scale disruption worldwide began in the morning of July 19 (Kyiv time). The unusual cascade of outages from the US to Asia came after Microsoft reported problems with its online services, including Azure and 365 online services, which were later revealed to be caused by an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon software for Windows operating systems.