By: Ellie Zhang 1

Airlines, broadcasts, banks, and many businesses are rushing to fix their systems after a worldwide IT outage struck on Friday.

The IT crash has had the biggest effect on air travel. Thousands of flights were canceled in the previous two days. United, American and Delta ordered a “global ground stop,” said Representative Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.

The crash only affected companies using Microsoft Windows. The company said that the IT problem was due to a faulty cybersecurity update to computers running Windows, and a “third-party software platform,” said on BBC News.

Cybersecurity CrowdStrike confirmed their software is what caused the technological issues.

“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” said the blog post from Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston.

Crowdstrike said they had restored their systems and fixed the issue, but needed some time to process all the information back into every computer.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” said the company’s CEO George Kurtz yesterday on BBC.

It was good news that schools reported that they had no big issues during the IT outage, as children are still learning in England and Wales.

A statement from a Welsh government spokesperson said: “We have had no reports of any major disruption. Today is the last day of term for many learners in Wales and so we do not anticipate any significant impact on education.”

Sources:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cjr4lv9x54go

https://apnews.com/article/worldwide-internet-outage-90cc7c25004ce83fd8391c4193064ece

Image Credit by Antonio Quagliata