If you couldn’t fly, buy tickets, withdraw money, watch the news, or buy groceries this morning, you’re not alone. A massive global IT outage affecting countless businesses and services grounded United, Delta, and American Airlines flights, delayed British soccer team Manchester United ticket sales, and knocked Sky News off the air. The reason? A Windows update.
According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” pushed Friday morning wreaked havoc on computers around the world and resulted in the dreaded blue screen of death on all clients connected to the host, rendering the machines unable to function.
Of note, Mac clients were not impacted by the issue, which has been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” though it could be a while before things are working normally again as affected PCs are sent into recovery mode and unable to reboot. On Reddit, a workaround from CrowdStrike Engineering has been posted, but it needs to be applied separately to each machine. And since Crowdstrike posted it behind a login page, many users will likely be unable to find it.
As of Monday morning, some systems were still affected by the glitch, though CrowdStrike reported that it was testing “a new technique to accelerate impacted system remediation” and is “in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique.”
Previous Apple software engineer Ananay outlined a “full technical breakdown” of how the update took down so many networks. In the meantime, somewhere Apple’s marketing team is working on a new ad.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor, Macworld
Michael Simon has been covering Apple for more than 20 years. He started covering rumors with Spymac when the iPod was the iWalk, and has owned nearly every iPhone Apple has ever made. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, son, and far too many gadgets.