By: Emila Zhang

On July 19th, 2024, airports delayed about 1,500 flights in all international airlines,
hospitals across the world canceled operations, the operators of 911 lines could not
respond to others in need, retailers closed for the entire day, Broadcasters could not air
TV, and computer systems were not responding! All of that happened just because of a
tiny, error of computer code.

A small, flawed software was sent out that Friday morning, by a cybersecurity
company called CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike makes software used by multiple
corporations, government agencies, and other organizations to protect against hackers
and online intruders. At first , things were normal, just like every day, but later the
chaos started. Computers crashed and transportation companies closed, all from that
update.

Many people were affected by the outage.

According to a BBC Article, “The IT Crash caused big problems for transport
companies as well, with disruption of services.”

. On Friday morning around 8:00am the CBBC channel came off air and
displayed an error message. “The channel displayed a blue screen asking for anyone
wanting to watch CBBC to go to I player instead to watch individual shows “. Sky news
was affected by the outage. Airports around the world reported problems, including in
Sydney in Australia, Edinburgh in Scotland and Berlin in Germany. Hospitals canceled
surgeries and tried their best to take care of patients. However, schools reported no
issues with their daily activities after the Crash.

CrowdStrike confirmed the issues and fixed the problem but said it will take time
till systems are up and running once again.

George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike 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.” Microsoft says that the IT crash is its greatest error yet.
The IT Crash caused confusion and chaos around the World.

Image Credit by Connecting Flights Guide