Bad Software Update Causes Havoc In Businesses Across The World Including Banks and Airlines Using Microsoft Windows

A bad software update is causing ICT outages across the world today in business that use Microsoft Windows on their computers. Some computers affected by the problem are showing the age old infamous “blue screen of death” one of the worst things that can happen on a windows computer.

The problem seems to have impacted airlines and banks the most but this may just be because delay of service for them is quite visible and some frustrated customers would resort to complaining on social media.

Other companies affected would be telecoms, insurance companies… really any company for whom security on employee computers is important enough they’d pay upwards of $50 a year for each computer.

The update is by a popular cloud-based security software company called CrowdStrike. The company confirmed the problem in an update on its website:

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 cyberattack…

We spoke to local cyber security expert Tawenga Toronga, CTO at Procomm Technologies to check if any companies locally have been affected. He said some companies may have been affected in the region:

We have worked with some companies regionally that use CrowdStrike and they would likely have been affected by this. CrowdStrike provides State of the art cloud-based endpoint security software and because it’s quite pricey, you will likely only find it being used in local branchs of large multinational companies.

Such a development coming from a large security firm like CrowdStrike was a surprise, and the lesson is that companies can no longer afford to not consider supply chain risks. A lot of revenue was lost today because of the outage and it’s a good thing that a fix has already been issued.

Microsoft itself has also acknowledged the problem but has also been clear about this not being their fault. It has also advised affected people to reboot as many times as it takes in steps to resolving the issues:

We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state. We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July.

We’ve received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage.

We recommend customers that are able to, to restore from a backup from before 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July.