Worldwide IT Outage – What We Know So Far

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19 July 2024 | Updated 22 July 2024

A major IT outage caused major disruptions at airports, GP surgeries, and retail stores.

Computer systems across the world crashed, experiencing the “Blue Screen of Death”, including airport departure screens, check-in systems, checkout machines in shops and the NHS app. 

Many, including American Airlines and the Swiss Federal Office for Cyber Security, blamed a faulty update or misconfiguration from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The update that has been automatically rolled out to servers and computer endpoints was believed to contain a corrupt driver file that causes machines to crash and display the “Blue Screen of Death”. 

Crowdstrike later confirmed that it was caused by a single content update which is causing Windows to crash and get stuck in a recovery loop.  

Francis West, CEO of Security Everywhere and cybersecurity expert, outlined the resulting Microsoft 365 service outage:

“Microsoft 365 service outage is being caused by a configuration change to Azure AD which is affecting a number of Microsoft services including: OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, Purview, Defender, InTune, OneNote and XBox live. 

“The UK has not been badly affected as it has a lot of its own M365 infrastructure, and the root cause is an update to the Azure infrastructure in the US.”

What Next? The Expert’s View 

Picture: a photograph of Francis West. Image Credit: Security Everywhere

Crowdstrike says that the issue has been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed” and that the outage is not down to a “security incident or cyberattack”. We asked Francis about the next steps companies might be taking:

“The only way to recover is to reboot each machine in safe mode and perform a system recovery, which poses challenges for small businesses without that technical expertise in-house. 

“These events could point to a lack of proper testing before deploying such a widespread update – but that remains to be seen.

“It’s possible that many FM companies, and companies in their supply chain, might be using CrowdStrike and facing challenges due to the incident, putting cybersecurity measures and contingency planning to the test.”

Picture: a photograph showing two people sitting opposite each other working on laptops. Image Credit: Pexels

Article written by Ella Tansley | Published 19 July 2024

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