Is The Massive Cyber Outage Bringing Space To A Standstill?

On 19th July, a massive IT outage in Windows has caused a “blue screen of death” to appear on computers around the world and affected businesses worldwide. The problem was caused by a botched update from the security giant CrowdStrike that sent computers and servers into an unrecoverable boot loop.

As we get reports of space industry companies experiencing IT issues because of the CrowStrike failure, we will up date our coverage. Has your company experienced a disruption due to the issue? Let us know via X at Orbital Today.

Who Has Experienced The Failure?

The first reports of disruptions appeared in the US on the evening of 18th July. Soon after, Microsoft announced that it was investigating problems with access to Microsoft 365 services.

As a result of the failure, there were problems with the work of banks and airports, utilities, mass media, telecommunications, cellular, Internet, etc., and the London Stock Exchange went down, among others. SkyNews in the UK was disconnected from the network due to a global failure. Among the companies whose work was affected by this situation are McDonald’s, United Airlines Holdings, LSE Group, The Washington Post, and others.

The Verge wrote that devices and servers running CrowdStrike software “disconnect from the network and go into an endless reboot cycle.”

Users of social networks also complained about failures.

The outage caused Delta, Frontier, Ryanair and other airlines around the world to cancel flights and hand-write boarding passes as the outage significantly affected airport operations.

In total, CNN counted at least 130 American Airlines flights cancelled and more than 200 delayed.

How Is The Problem Being Solved?

The change has now been rolled back, but many devices are still experiencing issues.

“We have received numerous reports of crashes on Windows computers occurring on various versions of the sensors. We have identified the content deployment associated with this issue and have reversed these changes,” CrowdStrike said.

The company also wrote a workaround, which consists of loading Windows in safe mode and removing a certain driver. However, it’s not easy for companies to get back to work because you have to delete the problematic file first. Computers are effectively stuck, and it’s quite difficult to undo the update.

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike is an American company specializing in corporate cyber security. One of its key products is Falcon, which the company describes as “providing real-time attack indicators, highly accurate detection and automated protection” against threats.

A representative of CrowdStrike stated that the cause of the incident was probably a problem with Falcon itself.