Mass Microsoft outage impacts broadcasters like Sky News & NDTV
A significant outage at Microsoft has impacted Windows users worldwide, leading to widespread disruptions across various sectors.
Broadcasters such as Sky News and NDTV experienced temporary outages, with Sky News going off-air for most of the morning and broadcasting an on-screen apology to viewers. The issue, known as the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, caused systems to suddenly shut down or restart. Microsoft has identified the problem as being linked to a recent update from CrowdStrike.
The widespread outages have been linked to a software update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. It is believed the issues are not linked to a malicious cyberattack, cybersecurity officials say, but rather stem from a misconfigured/corrupted update that CrowdStrike pushed out to its customers.
“Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement. “We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”
Hours after the issues started to emerge, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued a statement about the outages, saying the company has found a “defect” in an update for Windows that it issued. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.” In the statement, Kurtz confirmed that Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted by the update and said that its customers should refer to its support portal. He later apologized for the incident during a television interview.
Updated 19/07/2024 – 20:30 (BST)
