- cross-posted to:
- world
- cross-posted to:
- world
Fault in CrowdStrike caused airports, businesses and healthcare services to languish in ‘largest outage in history’
Services began to come back online on Friday evening after an IT failure that wreaked havoc worldwide. But full recovery could take weeks, experts have said, after airports, healthcare services and businesses were hit by the “largest outage in history”.
Flights and hospital appointments were cancelled, payroll systems seized up and TV channels went off air after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
It came from the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, and left workers facing a “blue screen of death” as their computers failed to start. Experts said every affected PC may have to be fixed manually, but as of Friday night some services started to recover.
As recovery continues, experts say the outage underscored concerns that many organizations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it, goes down. But these outages will happen again, experts say, until more contingencies are built into networks and organizations introduce better back-ups.
Private ownership and investment of capital created Crowdstrike as a profit-seeking venture. It also created MS Defender, SentinelOne, trellix, carbon black, etc. Competition in the marketplace (and there was/is lots of competition) forced these products to be as good as they could, and or self-stratify into pricing tiers. Crowdstrike, being the best (and most expensive) is the most widely-used. Note that not every enterprise requires that level of security, and so while CS is widely used, it is not ubiquitous. This outage could have been significantly worse.