One of the biggest cyber blackouts recorded in recent years affected several activities this Friday (19) across the planet, involving airlines, banks, hospitals and railway and telecommunications companies.
The flaw was caused by a corrupt update to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems of an antivirus program from American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Falcon, which ruled out a hacker attack or a cybersecurity issue.
On Wall Street, CrowdStrike shares closed down 11.10%, and Microsoft shares closed down 0.74%.
“I would like to personally apologize to all the organizations, groups and individuals who were impacted by this outage,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told CNBC.
Microsoft reported an “issue” that caused the user to experience a blue screen. “We recommend that customers follow CrowdStrike’s advice to resolve this issue,” the company added.
For cybersecurity expert Junade Ali, the flaw is “unprecedented” and “will go down in history”. “It has a direct impact on end users’ computers and its solution may require manual intervention, which represents a significant challenge,” he said.
The failure caused disruptions at several international airports, with problems with check-in systems. In Spain, all airports were affected. At the Barajas terminal in Madrid, passengers had to be patient.
“We are going to fly to Nice. We are very afraid of missing the flight because we don’t know what is happening,” Blanca Arroyo, who had just arrived from Colombia, told AFP.
Earlier this afternoon, the entity that manages Spanish airports, Aena, said its “main systems” had been “reestablished”.
– Hours at the airport –
In the United States, emergency services in at least three states were affected, and 2,400 flights were canceled throughout the day, a number that could continue to rise. “According to our information, flights have resumed across the country, but there remains some congestion,” a government official said.
Major US airlines, including Delta, United and American Airlines, have resumed operations.
In Mexico, airlines appeared to continue to struggle, with airports in Guadalajara and Monterrey asking passengers to arrive several hours in advance.
“We’ve been waiting since 3 a.m.,” said Juan Pablo Olvera at the Mexico airport. “Since the system is down, the QR codes didn’t work.”
In the middle of the holiday season, crowds formed at the airports of Berlin, Amsterdam-Schiphol in the Netherlands, and Hong Kong, airport authorities in those countries announced.
In Switzerland, Zurich airport, the country’s largest, reported that planes could now land again after landings were suspended.
In addition to airlines and airports, the cyber outage also affected hospitals in the Netherlands, the London Stock Exchange and Britain’s main railway company.
Britain’s Sky News channel has been disrupted, while in Australia, national broadcaster ABC announced its systems had been affected by a “major” outage.
In New Zealand, press reports have reported problems with banks and Parliament’s computer systems.
– ‘Resilient infrastructures’ –
The failure also disrupted “the computer systems” of the Paris 2024 Games, the event’s organizing committee said, a week before the opening ceremony, scheduled for July 26. However, activities “resumed as normal” on Friday afternoon, according to organizers.
According to Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the failure also “caused cardiac arrest in the auto industry supply chain”.
The global dimension of the failure has led some experts to highlight the fact that much of the world relies on a single supplier for such diverse services.
“We need to be aware that this type of software can be a common cause of failure in multiple systems at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor of software engineering at the University of York in England. “We need to develop infrastructures that are resilient to these problems,” he added.
Airlines such as KLM (Netherlands) and Ryanair (Ireland) suffered network disruptions. The same happened to three Indian airlines, IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa Air, whose reservation systems were affected.
Some airlines at Singapore International Airport also reported disruptions due to the cyber outage.
2024-07-20 00:14:41