An update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to a major IT outage on Friday, affecting businesses around the world.
CrowdStrike told NBC it was in the process of rolling back the update that caused the problem and later said a fix had been developed for the flaw.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected,” CEO George Kurtz said in a statement for X .
“This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been developed.”
He added that customers should check the support portal for the latest updates and work with their CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.
Kurtz apologized to those affected in an interview with NBC’s “TODAY” program early Friday.
“I want to start by saying that we deeply regret the impact we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he said.
“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug and caused a problem with Microsoft’s operating system. And now we’re working with every customer to make sure we can get them back online.”
Kurtz added that the update was normal and part of the company’s routine process to prevent security risks, but noted that an investigation would be required to see what went wrong.
The confirmation came after widespread reports of technical issues, with many Microsoft users around the world are experiencing an error screen known as the “blue screen of death.”
Shares of CrowdStrike fell about 11% on Friday, while Microsoft was little changed.
“A big outage”
Airlines, hospitals and financial services companies were among the many businesses affected.
American Airlines which bills itself as the world’s largest, said a technology issue was affecting “many carriers”, including US ones, while the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM said it was “forced to suspend most” of its operations.
In Great Britain, the Royal Surrey Hospital declared a “critical incident” and had to temporarily suspend radiation therapy. The National Health Service in England, meanwhile, said it was facing outages in the majority of doctors’ surgeries.
Banks and financial firms around the world have reported problems, with German insurance giant Allianz saying it was “experiencing a major outage affecting employees’ ability to log on to their computers. It’s affecting many companies besides Allianz.”
NBCUniversal is also affected by the CrowdStrike outage.
See the latest updates on affected companies here.
‘unprecedented’
Satnam Narang, senior staff researcher at Tenable, told CNBC on Friday that the outage had a “profound impact” and was unique in its size and scope.
“The challenge here is that security software — because it’s doing its job to protect organizations — needs to have more privileged access to those machines,” he said.
“So… while people might see these as Windows failures, they look at them and see a little blue screen pop up, it’s actually not a Windows problem, it’s related to a faulty or bad update from that security software.”
Narang added: “We’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s very unprecedented.”
Omer Grossman, CIO of cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said the damage caused by this outage would be “dramatic.”
“The bug is due to a software update to CrowdStrike’s EDR product. This is a product running with elevated privileges that protects endpoints. A malfunction in it can, as we see in the current incident, cause the operating system to crash.” he said in an emailed comment.
Getting back online is unlikely to be easy, according to Grossman.
“It turns out that because the endpoints are down – the blue screen of death – they can’t be updated remotely, and this problem has to be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days” , he added. .
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
