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 great to have alternatives. If it was all linux, and linux got hit, then it’d be the entire world in danger. Too bad M$ is just not good enough for it’s second most popular position.
Well, we got to see roughly something play out with the xz thing. In which case only redhat were going to be impacted because they were the only ones to patch ssh that way.
Most examples I can think of only end of affecting one slice or another of the Linux ecosystem. So a Linux based heterogenous market would likely be more diverse than this.
Of course, this was a relative nothing burger for companies that used windows but not crowdstrike. Including my own company. Well except a whole lot fewer emails from clients today compared to typical Fridays…