By D. Maan, Jadetimes News
Major IT Outage Recovery, CrowdStrike's Efforts to Get Devices Online
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, has come out to report that a majority of devices that went dark on Friday due to a worldwide IT outage are now online. The update was shared in a social media post by the company, whose flawed security update caused Microsoft Windows computers to crash worldwide. CrowdStrike also reassured the continuation of efforts to restore all affected systems.
According to Microsoft, the incident was one of the severest IT outages ever, which hit about 8.5 million computers worldwide. The most seriously affected were businesses, banks, hospitals, and airlines, some of whom are still working on full restoration.
CrowdStrike understood the deep impact of the outage, acknowledging the many sleepless nights of their customers, partners, and IT teams. "We understand the profound impact this has had on everyone. We know our customers, partners and their IT teams are working tirelessly and we're profoundly grateful," the company said. They apologized for the disruption.
It said it was accelerating the recovery by pushing out a new fix and did not indicate how many devices remained impacted by the outage.
The aviation sector appeared particularly hard hit, with more than 1,400 flights into or out of the US scrapped on Sunday, according to FlightAware. Delta and United Airlines were among the worst hit.
Also on Friday, health services in Britain, Israel, and Germany were hit hard; services were canceled. It is this kind of massive outage that underlines the vulnerability of global computer networks, showing how a single glitch could trigger worldwide chaos.
Noted Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, about the situation: "All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto dealers. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems."
CrowdStrike was before this happened considered one of the most trustworthy cyber security brands out there. Their website states 29,000 customers, many of whom are some of the largest in the US.
Interestingly, China was less affected due to the fact that CrowdStrike is not used by many there, and the dependency on Microsoft is less compared to other parts of the world.
The incident has brought into sharper focus the criticality of having strong measures on cybersecurity and the far reaching implications of technical vulnerabilities.
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