A global IT outage has caused chaos at airports, banks, railways andbusinesses around the world as a wide range of services were taken offline and millions of people were affected.
In one of the most widespread IT crashes ever to hit companies and institutions globally, air transport ground to a halt, hospitals were affected and large numbers of workers were unable to access their computers. In the UK Sky News was taken off air temporarily and the NHS GP booking system was down.
Microsoft’s Windows service was at the centre of the outage, with experts linking the problem to a software update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that has affected computer systems around the world. Experts said the outage could take days from which to recover because every PC may have to be fixed manually.
Overnight, Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an issue with its services and apps, with the organisation’s service health website warning of “service degradation” that meant users may not be able to access many of the company’s most popular services, used by millions of business and people around the world.
Among the affected firms are Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, which said on its website: “Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage … We advise passengers to arrive at the airport three hours in advance of their flight to avoid any disruptions.”
It’s not specific to Microsoft, but the general idea of letting proprietary software install whatever it wants whenever it wants directly into your kernel is a bad idea regardless. If the user had any control over this update process, organizations could do small scale testing themselves before unleashing the update on their entire userbase. If it were open source software, the code would be reviewed by many more eyes and tested independently by many more teams before release. The core issue is centralizing all trust on one organization, especially when that organization is a business and thus profit-driven above all else which could be an incentive to rush updates.