By: Rachel Chen

Recently from Thursday evening, July 18th, 2024, to Friday morning that same week, an IT crash, caused by a cybersecurity company’s software issue, resulted in many problems for people worldwide.

The cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, is in partnership with Microsoft, the company that owns the Windows operating system. Therefore, all devices using the Windows operating systems have been affected.

CrowdStrike has now fixed the main issue, but the system is not fully recovered yet. CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz spoke on the NBC news channel, apologizing for all the issues their customers were facing.

He said, “It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission… to make sure every customer is fully recovered.”

Because so many computers stopped working, many airlines had to either cancel or delay their flights. Over 1500 flights were cancelled in the whole world. Other transport systems such as trains experienced the same issues because they have to use online systems to schedule departures.

Numerous news channels such as CBBC and Sky News were unable to broadcast during the crash. The CBBC channel crashed at 8:00 am Friday morning. The channel displayed a blue screen that told everyone who wanted to watch the channel to go to iPlayer instead.

GP services, or General Practitioner services, were greatly affected as well. Many appointments were cancelled. Customers were unable to book any new appointments and it was difficult for hospitals or pharmacies to create new prescriptions. Doctors were even writing prescriptions by hand.

However, schools for children were not affected much. Only schools in England and Wales were still open and other schools had already started summer break. Despite being open, schools in England and Wales were on their last day, meaning not much learning was done, sparing them from the effects of the outage.