The company behind a major IT glitch impacting major businesses around the world has said a fix has ‘been deployed’.
The outage has hit media companies around the world as well as airlines, financial services and transport operators.
In Ireland, the National Cyber Security Centre has said that it is aware of the problem – but insists all essential services in this country are continuing to operate normally.
It notes that Government IT services are currently unaffected.
The outage is impacting on Microsoft services and is linked to a systems upgrade from cyber security firm CrowdStrike.
In a statement online this morning CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the issue “has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed”.
He confirmed that the glitch is “not a security incident”.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
“First and foremost it wasn’t a cyber-attack,” he told Sky News. “It was related to this content update.
“The update had a software bug in that caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” he said.
“We identified this very quickly and remediated this issue and as systems come back online as they are rebooted, they are coming back and they are working and now we are working with each and every customer to make sure we can bring them back online.”
He said the global impact of the problem is not necessarily surprising.
"Complex world"
“When you look at software, it is a very complex world and there are a lot of interactions and always staying ahead of the adversary is certainly a very tall task,” he said.
“So these sorts of things you try to understand and mitigate them and in some cases you have a weird interaction.
“It didn’t seem to happen on every windows system; there are different versions and flavours and patch levels if you will and we are just trying to sort out where that negative interaction was and that is what we are focused on – getting customers back up and running.”
He said it could be some time before all businesses are fully recovered.
“We’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where we were and we continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems,” he said.
A Ryanair Boeing 737-8AS aircraft in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in August 2011. Picture by: Greg Bajor / Alamy Stock PhotoElsewhere, Ryanair has this morning confirmed it is impacted by the problem – advising customers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their departure time.
The airline is advising anyone who is due to travel today but has yet to check in that they must now do so at the airport.
The Leap Card app and TFI Live are also impacted by the outage.
Transport for Ireland (TFI) has apologised for the disruption to the online services, but says onboard fare payment systems are operating as normal.
Ireland’s NCT system has also experienced outages.
(Cont...) To fix this, users may restore their Windows 365 Cloud PC to a known good state prior to the release of the update (July 19, 2024) as documented here:
Enterprise - https://t.co/uMhgKSTlb0
Business - https://t.co/UnsNVOHBM3— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 19, 2024
Microsoft is urging all impacted users to restore their Windows 365 to a ‘known good state” prior to the release of the CrowdStrike update.
Main image is a split screen showing passengers at Madrid Airport and an impacted checkout terminal in Australia.
