By Joke Kujenya
A MASSIVE cyber outage disrupted airline operations, banks, and media services worldwide on Friday.
The IT issue affected countries including Singapore, the United States, and Australia.
Airports and airlines reported significant problems. Sydney Airport grounded flights, and United Airlines halted operations.
The London Stock Exchange experienced interruptions, and Berlin Airport faced check-in delays due to technical faults.
Sky News went off-air.
Executive Chairman David Rhodes confirmed the channel’s inability to broadcast live and apologized to viewers.
Online news reports remained accessible.
The outage also affected rail transportation.
Govia Thameslink Railway in the UK reported widespread IT issues across its network, causing delays and potential cancellations.
Telstra Group in Australia announced service disruptions on its social media.
The company linked the problems to issues with Microsoft and CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm.
The Cause
Microsoft stated a configuration change in its Azure backend caused connectivity failures.
This impacted Microsoft 365 services, including PowerBI, Teams, and OneDrive for Business.
The tech giant is working to restore full functionality.
Executive Apologies
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz acknowledged a defect in a content update for Windows hosts caused the problems.
He apologized for the disruption and assured efforts to resolve the issue.
The global outage highlighted the vulnerabilities of interconnected technologies.
As services recover, businesses face backlogs and ongoing challenges in restoring normal operations.
Interconnected Technologies Outage Resolved
HOURS later, airlines, healthcare providers, shipping companies, and financial services started to recover on Friday after a global cyber outage disrupted their computer systems for several hours.
The incident was said to have highlighted the vulnerabilities of interconnected technologies, which have become more prominent since the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the outage resolved, companies are now handling backlogs of delayed and canceled flights, missed medical appointments, and unprocessed orders.
These complications, executives say, may take days to clear up.
Businesses are also evaluating measures to prevent similar outages in the future.
The disruption was triggered by a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
This update caused flight groundings, disrupted broadcasting, and left many customers without access to essential services like healthcare and banking.
It was blamed on the heavy reliance on interconnected technology, which has grown since the COVID-19 pandemic, and amplified the impact of this single software issue.
The outage brought attention to CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity firm with over 20,000 clients, including Amazon and Microsoft.
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