Major banks, media outlets, and even Disneyland are enduring the current chaos prompted by a mass IT outage occurring across the world. While the cause is pointing toward a software update, Microsoft is currently investigating, stating it is taking “mitigation action” to deal with “the lingering impact” of the outage.

So far, the mass tech outage has sparked delays and issues at most major European airports, including London’s Gatwick Airport, Berlin Airport, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Scotland’s Edinburgh Airport, airports in Madrid, Barcelona, and others across Spain, as well as Prague Airport, CNN reported on Friday (July 19).

In Asia, Cathay Pacific Airways and Hong Kong Disneyland have reportedly said their operations have also been impacted by the technical issues.

While evidence points to a software update blunder, a spokesperson for Australia’s Home Affairs minister said earlier that the outage appeared to be related to an issue at global cyber-security firm Crowdstrike, the BBC reported on Friday.

Major banks, media outlets, and even Disneyland are enduring the current chaos prompted by a mass IT outage

Image credits: Pexels/Matthew Turner

Australia’s national cyber security coordinator described it as a “large-scale technical outage” and reportedly said there was no information to suggest it was an attack.

American Airlines, which is the world’s biggest by passenger numbers, told the BBC the IT problems were because of a “technical issue with Crowdstrike that is impacting multiple carriers.”

United Airlines told the BBC: “A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United.”

There have been reports suggesting that Crowdstrike, which produces antivirus software, issued a software update that caused Windows devices to crash.

Image credits: Pexels/Oleksandr P

As of Friday 11:10 CET, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz reportedly said that the IT issue causing a global outage has been identified and that a fix has been deployed.

As per CNN, he issued an official statement that read: “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.

“Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Microsoft is currently investigating, stating it is taking “mitigation action” 

Image credits: Pexels/Tanathip Rattanatum

It further read: “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.

“We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.

“Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

The first reports of IT outages came from Australia, as payment systems went down at local stores, including Woolworths, while financial institutions such as the National Australia Bank were also affected, as per the BBC.

The outage appeared to be related to an issue at global cyber-security firm Crowdstrike

Image credits: Pexels/Niklas Jeromin

The issues then spread to the US, with the state of Alaska warning that its emergency services were affected, eventually leading to several US airlines — United, Delta, and American Airlines — grounding their flights around the globe.

Tokyo-Narita and Delhi airports also said their services had been affected.

Various media were affected by the technical bug, as British broadcaster Sky News went off air, the BBC reported.

CrowdStrike’s engineers took action to address the problem, according to the advisory, which told customers to reboot their computers and perform other actions if they were still having technical issues, CNN reported.

CrowdStrike’s engineers took action to address the problem

Image credits: London’s Gatwick airport

The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and it is not impacting Mac or Linux operating systems, according to the advisory.

CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats, the American broadcaster explained.

As a result, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system, CNN reported.

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