Experts: Full recovery from ‘largest’ IT outage in history to ‘take weeks’

Cybersecurity experts have warned that recovering from the “largest outage in history”, caused by a global CrowdStrike IT glitch, could “take weeks.”

On Friday, airports, businesses, healthcare, and news services worldwide languished in despair after the sudden IT crash and the appearance of Microsoft’s “blue screen of death” on millions of computers around the world.

Also, stock shares dropped as airlines, financial institutions, banks, and TV channels were engulfed in chaos after the crash, one of the biggest in recent years.

In financial services, Metro Bank reported problems with its phone lines in the UK and Santander said card payments “may be affected.”

Millions of computers worldwide were unusable and unable to be rebooted, triggering a global hunt for the suspected villain.  

Computer experts all over the world are still scrambling to understand what caused the “largest outage in history.”

Cyber security experts may take weeks or even months before they analyze the data and get a clear image of how the incident took place.

Presently, what’s obvious is that two separate systems - Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, and a software update from cyber security company CrowdStrike - crashed on the same day.

Microsoft and CrowdStrike are thoroughly woven into the fabric of the world’s digital ecosystem.

However, CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas took the blame, saying a software bug in its update to an antivirus program operating on Microsoft Windows triggered the crash.

CrowdStrike has already apologized for launching its botched software upgrade.

“We know what the issue is,” CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz said, adding that, the company was “actively working” on the process for resolving the problem, but it would take time.

He said the crippling software update failure had been fixed for now, but getting all systems back up and running would require some time.

Kurtz said the firm was deeply sorry for the disruption caused by the virus which affected systems running the world’s most used OS (operating system), Microsoft Windows.

A senior cybersecurity consultant said the scale of the crash was unprecedented.

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Hunt added that cybersecurity managers had been expecting such a crash for decades.

Crowdstrike stocks turned in its worst performance since 2022. Shares of rival cybersecurity firms climbed, including a 7.8 percent jump for SentinelOne and a 2.2 percent rise for Palo Alto Networks.

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