Worldwide IT Outage Hits Media, Banks and Airlines, and Much More!

Updated: 10:41

Major IT outages are currently affecting everything from airlines to banks, with major flights around the worlds airports either grounded, and ones already in the air no doubt affected too, which will of course be causing significant delays to travellers around the world today, with reports from Amsterdam,  Japan, India, Poland, UK, and many more. This also seems to be hitting UK railway companies in what rail companies are reporting at “widespread IT issues”. However, it’s hard to tell if train passengers will be really impacted, or if this will just feel like a normal day on the trains in the UK.

The cause is currently unknown but Microsoft has said it is “taking mitigation action”. However, early reports are literally flooding in that it may be caused by Crowdstrike Vulcan Agent, an antivirus software which issued an update and seems to have gone catastrophically wrong, causing Windows systems to suffer the classic Blue Screen of Death. However, it could be that two simultaneous massive faults are happening together, or one or the other.

According to BBC News, other industries are are being hit, with shipping terminals in Poland, GP’s are having issues with their booking systems, NHS GP systems are down in many areas. Even Sky News was knocked offline but has since been recovered.

From my own whisperings with friends and family, some IT systems are down at local UK councils, offices, and other IT infrastructure, in sectors that wouldn’t normally be connected to each other, so whatever is the root cause is both widespread and significant.

As of 9:50am it is being reported that the Paris Olympics IT systems have been impacted, and that contingency plans are in effect as the games begin in just one weeks time. And that some hospitals in Germany have had to cancel non-emergency operations due to their IT issues.

Image courtesy of BBC News.

10:00 has reports of supermarkets having issues with payment systems, with many businesses around the world also reporting having to fall back to pen-and-paper solutions due to widespread IT failures.

Crowdstrike has revealed they are aware of these issues, and said that there is “no need to open a support ticket, as they’re well aware of the issues.” Reports on how to fix the problem are currently unknown as every system is different and may require unique solutions, but we’re hearing of everything from larger server and workstations being impacted, as well as smaller devices such as laptops and desktop systems.

Image courtesy of thousandeyes.

Microsoft services are also impacted, such as Microsoft 365 which is also causing issues, but is seemingly related to the CloudStrike outage.

However, a lot of smaller services are already recovering, and it seems the chance of data loss is very small, but that resolving the problem on systems using Bitlocker is a whole other can of worms that is developing, as it may not be possible to easily apply quicker fixes to this boot looping issue caused by the CloudStrike issue.

Is there a Fix?

CrowdStrike Falcon software seems to be the source of the issue. A broken driver file in this mornings update is causing a boot failure on these systems. However, to resolve the update, the update needs to be rolled back manually by accessing the file system of the computer using another working system, deleting the file, and then rebooting. This is because the systems can’t be patched automatically, as they’re unable to boot. So fixes may take some time. However, CrowdStrike has said there will be a statement shortly.

This story is developing and being updated in real time.