Slowly but surely, the world is getting back online after Friday’s epic software fail. CrowdStrike reported early Monday that a “significant number” of impacted devices and systems are up and running again.
The company posted on social media that it “continues to focus on restoring all systems.” At its peak, the outage affected internet services, airlines, banks, hospitals, and many small businesses that lacked the IT staff to get systems back online in a timely manner.
As we previously reported, the outage was apparently caused by software from CrowdStrike called Falcon, which was updating Microsoft Windows. Falcon is an application that provides cybersecurity features for computers including anti-virus and intrusion detection, among other things. A potential bug in the software apparently caused systems to constantly reboot.
“It is up to the IT department of each company to get their systems back in service, potentially working with CrowdStrike support, so it is impossible to put a timeline on when each individual company will be fully operational,” Dominic Chorafakis, a cybersecurity expert at Akouto, told ConsumerAffairs. “The fix does appear to be relatively simple so the issue should not persist for too long.”
There’s still a lot of uncertainty
But after a full weekend of work, CrowdStrike said it could not definitively say how many devices are still being affected by the outage. We do know that more than 1,400 flights in the U.S. were canceled on Sunday, according to FlightAware, with Delta and United the most severely affected.
Overseas, hospitals in Germany, Israel and the U.K. were hard hit, and many scheduled procedures had to be postponed.
Linda Khan, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), took to social media to comment on the modern world’s reliance on technology for nearly every phase of life, noting that a single “glitch” can result in a system-wide outage that can bring multiple industries to a standstill.
