A widespread technology outage caused flight cancellations, disrupted banking and hospital systems, and took media outlets offline on Friday. This major disruption affected companies and services globally, highlighting our reliance on software from just a few providers.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike stated that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack, and that a fix was in progress. The problem arose when a faulty update was deployed to computers running Microsoft Windows.
Despite efforts to resolve the issue, the disruptions continued and intensified. News outlets worldwide reported that airlines, telecommunications providers, banks, and media broadcasters lost access to computer systems.
In response, Microsoft 365 announced on X that they were “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate the impact more expeditiously” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability”.
