How millions of Americans could go without a paycheck this month due to global Crowdstrike crash

Millions of workers are at risk of not receiving their paychecks this month amid a global outage that could last weeks.

Several of America’s biggest banks saw their systems crash this morning, preventing people from accessing their accounts or receiving or sending money.

TD Bank and Bank of America was still down for millions this afternoon but TD said its systems have been restored while customers are still complaining on Downdetector that they can’t use the banking systems.

The Global Payroll Association (GPA) warned that people ‘risk going without their wages’ because their employers or banks rely on CrowdStrike for cybersecurity protection. 

It remains unclear how widespread the payroll disruption is, but Melanie Pizzey, the founder and CEO of GPA said her company had received complaints from a number of clients who couldn’t access their payroll software because of the outage.

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Payroll systems typically need to be notified of any issues that would stop direct deposits from going through at least two days before the payday for the issue to be resolved in time. 

‘Depending on the length of this outage, it could have very serious implications for businesses across the nation, particularly those who process payroll on a weekly basis,’ Pizzey said. 

‘Furthermore, we could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage.’ 

George Kurtz, the CEO of the software company whose bug caused the issues, said it could be weeks before systems are back up and running.

Meanwhile, issues with Visa and Zelle are not allowing people to make or receive payments, and there’s no estimated timeframe for when they’ll be back up and running.

The outage first started with Microsoft, leading many people to believe that the company’s systems were at fault, but within hours, Crowdstrike admitted that an update to its ‘Falcon Sensor,’ which searches for viruses and malicious attacks was to blame.

People took to social media to complain about the outage’s impact on the financial implications, with one person writing on X: ‘No direct deposit yet. Global it outage coupled with TD being Canada’s crappiest big 5 bank now means could be a bit.’ 

Another person wrote: ‘My company was not affected by the IT outage but our payroll software was. Happy Friday.’ 

One Bank of America customer wrote on Downdetector that they weren’t able to deposit a check at a local branch at 11:30 a.m..

The customer said when she went back five hours later, the money was ‘still not available’ and there wasn’t any record that the check was deposited.

TD Bank issued a statement at 2 p.m. ET, 12 hours after the outage began, telling customers that many of its impacted systems have been restored but warned that they may still experience service delays and longer wait times.

The Crowdstrike outage impacted Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service that are used by more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and eight of the top financial institutions across 43 US states.

Microsoft 365 is a cloud-powered platform that helps businesses protect against cyber threats and keep information secure and private for shared files and email messages and links.

Its Defender for Office app helps prevent, detect and respond to phishing and ransomware threats.

Azure is a cloud firewall security serves that provides threat protections for files, data and other apps.

The software failure grounded airplanes, disrupted 911 call centers, and caused government agencies like the Social Security Administration to shut down for the day.

Crowdstrike has assured customers that the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity attack, but tech market analyst Dan Ives told DailyMail.com that the global outage is ‘an epic disaster’ and it ‘will take 24 to 36 hours to fully get under control.’