When computer screens turned blue and displayed a message saying “fatal error” on Friday, many thought it was a temporary problem.
What they didn’t know was that it was a computer blackout that unleashed chaos in different parts of the world with thousands of flights cancelled, hospitals temporarily out of service, banks and companies in serious trouble, and all kinds of disruptions that triggered a global alert.
The reason? An update to an antivirus program from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike linked to the Windows operating system.
The firm said it had identified the “defect” and implemented a fix, while Microsoft said the “underlying cause” of the flaw has been corrected in its applications.
However, some of the problems could take days to fix.explained BBC Technology correspondent Joe Tidy.
In response to the crisis, Microsoft said some systems running Windows Client and Windows Server were “stuck in a reboot state.”
But the company also reported receiving “reports of successful recovery from some customers who attempted multiple reboot operations” on the affected “virtual machines.”
“The general assessment is that rebooting is an effective troubleshooting step at this stage, although We have received feedback from customers that multiple reboots may be required (up to 15 have been reported)”the company stated.
“Customers who continue to experience issues should contact CrowdStrike for additional assistance,” Microsoft said.
The “blue screen of death”
The blue screen that alerts about the failure in the softwarealso known by the nickname “Blue Screen of Death,” can cause users to get stuck when restarting their computers.
That’s why restarting multiple times can eventually get customers out of that jam.
Computer experts have warned that systems need to be rebooted in “safe mode” to remove the faulty update.
“This is extremely time consuming and will take days for organizations to do this on a large scale.”,” Kevin Beaumont told the BBC.
“Basically, we have one of the most impactful technology incidents in the world caused by a cybersecurity vendor.”
The problem with the suggestion to restart the computer in safe mode is that it is done manually.
While restarting a computer multiple times is a relatively simple process, the challenge for large companies is to automate it to find a better solution..
Those with organized and well-staffed information technology teams could potentially fix problems more quickly, he told The New York Times Lukasz Olejnik, independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant.
But for other firms the solution may take longer.
The gigantic impact
In terms of the immediate impact on people it is hard to think of a more serious one, said the BBC’s technology correspondent.
“No other incident has affected such a broad sector of industry and society.”
The most recent major outage came when Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, went down in 2021.
This affected billions of social media users, as well as millions of businesses.
But this Crowdstrike outage is on another level, Tidy explains, because it has potentially affected many more computers and businesses around the world.
The nightly update was supposed to be small, as the company described it.
So theoretically, this was not a major update to the software cyber security.
“That could explain why the software “It was not checked as rigorously as if it had been a major update. And how it reached all computers without being blocked,” the journalist adds.
But it also raises big questions for the cybersecurity firm: How could a small update cause so much damage?
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- “The scale of this disruption is unprecedented”: Windows computer outage affects airlines, banks and healthcare systems around the world
- What is Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity software blamed for the global computer blackout