Global IT Outage: Why Thousands of Businesses Are at a Standstill

Global IT Outage: Why Thousands of Businesses Are at a Standstill

Panic on the planet this Friday, July 19: thousands of companies and services are at a standstill around the world following a huge bug during a Windows software update. Here's what you need to know about this unprecedented outage with impressive consequences for millions of PCs and servers.

It's a black Friday for thousands of businesses around the world. A giant computer outage has been affecting millions of Windows-powered PCs since early this morning. Airports and airlines, hospitals, television channels, online media, banks, and government agencies—many services are down and unable to be provided at the moment. Paradoxically, this global outage is not due to a cyberattack but the result of an update deployed by CrowdStrike, an American company specializing in cybersecurity.

A faulty update to patch a flaw, deployed on a large scale, has caused panic. The failure only affects PCs running Windows 10, characterized by the appearance of a blue screen (BSOD) inviting users to restart the computer in recovery mode, but without success, causing reboots in a loop. But why are millions of PCs around the world experiencing these malfunctions? It's because CrowdStrike operates protection and monitoring on thousands of Microsoft's Azure servers. As a knock-on effect, the many companies that use Microsoft's services are impacted. The snowball effect is impressive.

In the United States, for example, major airlines such as Delta, United, and American Airlines are forced to keep their planes grounded. Flights are no longer provided for departures and arrivals. German, Spanish, British, Dutch, and Hungarian airports are also suffering from the phenomenon.

Global IT Outage: Patch Being Deployed

George Kurtz, the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, took to X to reassure his customers. He said: "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they're communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers."

CrowdStrike has also provided the procedure to follow if your PC continues to restart in a loop.

  • First, restart the computer in safe mode by pressing the F4 key during startup).
  • Once the PC is accessible, open the \Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike folder. Locate the csagent.sys or C-00000291*.sys file (the star symbolizes a long list of numbers).
  • Delete this item and restart the PC. Everything should be back to normal.