CrowdStrike’s IT outage was devastating to commerce, healthcare, and transportation because it was completely agnostic to the services it affected.
This was not an industry or role specific failure like the disconnected issue interruption in CHAPS transactions supervised by the Bank of England the night before.
To have a problem, regardless of where you were in the world or what industry you were in, all you needed was to run devices on a Microsoft network with CrowdStrike protection.
Watch live: CrowdStrike rules out cyber attacks as world faces technological ‘disaster’
Its disruptive power lies in the functionality that made it so popular in providing security to the systems it eventually corrupted.
CrowdStrike focuses on protecting “endpoints,” the devices connected to a network, with about a quarter of the security market, which equates to hundreds of millions of individually affected computers.
That done the impact unpredictable but widespread and, fortunately, in most cases, inconvenient and disruptive rather than catastrophic.
At airports, Ryanair could not access its automated check-in vehicle, but easyJet could.
Queues at the Ryanair check-in counter in Stansted. Photo: PA
Retailers such as Morrisons and Waitrose were unable to process card payments while others continued.
And Sky News was unable to broadcast live on television for a few hours, while BBC News, which uses the same editorial software system, was not interrupted.
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Transport was clearly the hardest hit.
With safety a top priority, airlines and airports had no choice but to suspend and cancel flights when check-in systems were inaccessible.
Travelers at Los Angeles Airport sleep on a boarding bridge, waiting for a delayed flight to Dulles Airport. Photo: AP
The problems spread around the world as the software update arrived and systems were turned on, from Australia through Europe to the US.
Britain’s railways have warned of possible disruptions, with 14 operating companies affected.
In practice, it appears to have been limited to customer information on departure boards, with more familiar and completely disconnected signal issues causing much longer delays on some routes.
The seats appear to have come off slightly.
Barclays confirmed that one of its services, Smart Investor, was affected, but the other major lenders said their branches and payment systems were operating normally.
Read more on Sky News:
Serious questions to answer after ‘largest IT outage in history’
IT outage fixes ‘may still take some time’
What we know about IT disruption
Global IT outage causes chaos at airports
What matters now is how long it takes to fix, how to avoid a repeat, and what resources companies have to recover CrowdStrike losses.
The company says a fix is in the works, but there are warnings that a machine-by-machine reboot will be required to get devices back on networks.
Keep up with the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
CrowdStrike and Microsoft are already facing questions about how this could have happened and whether a lack of competition in an industry dominated by giants caused a small mistake to become a universal problem.
Meanwhile, any corporate lawyers who can get their computers working may be considering seeking compensation for an incident that will have cost companies millions, perhaps billions, in lost revenue and disruption.
For now, they and we will have to content ourselves with the idea that it could have been worse.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
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