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This week’s global IT problems are shaping up to be one of the biggest IT outages ever, affecting countless organisations and Microsoft computers all over the world. It is example of how a minor technical change, made without proper testing, deployed rather stupidly on a Friday, by a company that is unknown to most people outside of the IT industry, can wreak widespread havoc!
So what happened?
On Friday reports began to emerge of IT problems where Windows computers were getting stuck with the infamous “blue screen of death” — a bright blue error screen with a message that displays when Windows encounters a critical failure, crashes or cannot load.
The outages were first noticed in Australia early on Friday, and reports quickly came in from the rest of Asia, Europe and United States as the regions began their day.
At around the same time, Microsoft reported a significant outage at one of its most used Azure cloud regions covering much of the central United States.
Microsoft has blamed a flawed software update from a company called CrowdStrike, a security technology vendor. CrowdStrike’s Falcon software is designed to stop cyber attacks and includes a suite of products running on individual devices and delivered via the cloud.
In a LinkedIn post, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was due to a single Windows update, meaning it only affects Windows systems. Mac and Linux customers are operating normally. Kurtz also added that the issue wasn’t the result of a cyberattack or a hack, and that Crowdstrike has identified and isolated the issue, and deployed a fix.
So what next?
IT support companies and departments around the world will be working overtime to deploy the fix, which at the time of writing, requires each endpoint to be manually updated to fix the issue, meaning that it is going to take some time to get all the effected systems back up and running!
None of our Bluespires clients have been directly effected, but it will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the biggest IT issues the world of IT has ever faced!
Do contact us if you have concerns
If you have questions or concerns about this or any other IT outage, please do not hesitate to email us at support@bluespires.co.uk or reach out to your regular point of contact.
We are here to help and will try and advise the best course of action for you based on current information from Microsoft.