What happened to Microsoft? CrowdStrike IT outage as it happened

The catastrophic IT outage that knocked hundreds of millions of computers offline, causing travel chaos and crippling healthcare systems, could take weeks to fix, experts have warned.

Airports, banks, supermarkets and other major institutions saw services disrupted yesterday due to a flawed update rolled out by CrowdStrike.

The tech firm’s chief executive George Kurtz said a fix had been deployed for a bug in an update which affected Microsoft Windows PCs, causing many to crash, some displaying the so-called ‘blue screen of death’.

IT infrastructure at businesses and institutions around the world collapsed, taking many businesses and their online services offline.

NHS England said ‘the majority of GP practices’ experienced disruption and ambulance services reported increases in 999 and NHS 111 calls from patients who were unable to contact other NHS providers.

The National Pharmacy Association said pharmacies had seen issues ‘including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries’.

Airlines reported being unable to process passengers and resorted to manually checking in customers at airports around the world with 167 flights departing from the UK and 171 incoming cancelled on Friday.

Aviation analytics company Cirium said 5,078 flights – or 4.6% of those scheduled – were cancelled globally.

Govia Thameslink Railway warned passengers to expect disruption because of ‘widespread IT issues’ while Sky News was forced off air briefly on Friday morning, while customers faced issues with attempting to pay using cards.

Mr Kurtz said he is ‘deeply sorry’ for the situation and said CrowdStrike was ‘actively working’ with those impacted.

Saying the issue had been ‘identified’ and that a ‘fix has been deployed’, he said his team was ‘fully mobilised to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers’.

In a letter to customers and partners, Mr Kurtz said: ‘We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this.

‘I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.’

Industry expert Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned it could take ‘weeks’ for all computers and systems to be fully restored, while Mr Kurtz said it would take ‘some time’.

He told NBC: ‘Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were and we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.’

Cybersecurity experts said it is good news that the issue has only impacted Windows users and a fix having been deployed should mean larger IT departments can quickly begin restoring services, while Microsoft deputy chief information security officer Ann Johnson said they could not predict how long it would take to get all customers back online.

Signs of disruption are likely to remain into the weekend with the National Pharmacy Association warning pharmacy services are likely to see delays as outlets deal with a backlog of medicine deliveries while airports across the UK stressed that passengers should check with airlines for any delays or cancellations before travelling over the weekend.

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