It didn’t take a cyber attack: a simple update has caused chaos all over the world. Numerous companies have been affected by a Crowdstrike update on computers and servers that mostly run Windows 10. The fault is Crowdstrike’s, not Microsoft’s. Many of these computers have encountered the dreaded blue screen that appears when the operating system encounters a problem from which it cannot safely recover. The appearance of this screen means that all system operations are stopped and the computer must be restarted. The person writing this suffered this problem yesterday and it was manually resolved. If this happens to a large part of the equipment of a large company, chaos is guaranteed.
The issue was caused by the CrowdStrike sensor update that caused Windows 10 to become unstable. Specifically, the bug appears to be coming from the Falcon sensor, which is part of the CrowdStrike software. The cybersecurity multinational (image) has acknowledged this issue and is investigating the cause. The company has stated that they are “actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide full, ongoing updates on our website. Additionally, we recommend that organizations make sure to contact CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”
Airlines, the most affected
Banks, media outlets and, in particular, airlines around the world are suffering problems caused by the erroneous Crowdstrike update. As reported by Reuters, the first problems began to be detected in the main North American airlines such as American Airlines, Delta and United, as well as in the low-cost Allegiant. This problem adds to a previous outage in Azure that affected mainly the North American low-cost airlines.
In Spain, airlines and airport operator AENA have also been some of the organisations most affected. In the case of the latter, the problems have been detected mainly in the check-in systems as well as in the information panels for passengers. The firm has already reported that the incident is being resolved, although it also assures that the manual resolution of the problem and the individual recovery of each machine will cause delays in the normal operations of the air operator.
Ryanair and Vueling have also been affected by the problem. In the case of the Irish airline, it recommends its customers arrive at the airport three hours in advance. Iberia, for its part, has not been affected, beyond the complications that the impact may cause to the airport operators in which it operates. At the moment, it is not only AENA that is affected: also the operators of the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Australia and Germany, in addition to the Australian ones.
The issue was caused by the CrowdStrike sensor update that caused Windows 10 to become unstable
To a lesser extent, financial institutions have been the other sector affected by the impact of Crowdstrike. It does not seem to have caused major damage to the large Spanish institutions, BBVA and Santander, although it has affected the Basque Kutxa and the Galician Abanca. The impact has also affected important banks in the rest of the world and, above all, payment systems.
In Spain, both Repsol and Osakidetza (the Basque health service) have reported incidents that are affecting their normal operations. The biggest impact is on the online appointment service on their platform, which is currently down. The Basque health system is not the only one: the British NHS has also been affected. In that country, the Sky News channel and some of the country’s railway companies have had to temporarily suspend their services due to the problem.
Australia is the country where services have been most affected. Many railways, airports and services such as Uber have had to change their daily operations to a greater or lesser extent.
