On Friday, July 19, reports began to be received from all over the world about massive failures in computer systems. They affected almost all areas of activity, including banks, the world's leading media, airports and many other companies. As a result, numerous flights were cancelled, and aircraft already in the air were forced to seek an emergency landing. The problem even affected the catering sector – Japanese McDonald's announced the suspension of its restaurant chain throughout the country. Even ordinary users began to experience a BSOD error on their computers, known as the “blue screen of death.” However, the cause of what was happening was not the beginning of the “apocalypse”, not solar flares, or even a hacker attack, but just an unsuccessful software update.
In many countries, airport operations were paralyzed due to a global IT failure. Photo source: bbc.com
What happened to computer systems around the world
An unusual and extremely large-scale cascade of outages has swept across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. The first problems appeared in the United States late on Thursday (local time). They affected Microsoft services, including Azure and 365. Problems with the IT infrastructure were also felt by residents of Australia, but then the incident quickly spread to other countries around the world.
The Downdetector service, which monitors outages, showed a sharp increase in problems with various web resources, including Microsoft online applications, banking sites, airline applications, stock exchanges, etc. Meanwhile, the Sky News channel was forced to interrupt its live broadcast.
Many companies around the world were forced to suspend their operations. Photo source: habr.com
Following this, major airlines such as United Airlines and Delta Airlines announced flight suspensions due to communication problems resulting from the ongoing global outage. About possible interruptions due to «broad IT problems» Britain's largest railway company also warned its passengers. Ultimately, thousands of different companies around the world were paralyzed.
Cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt wrote in a post on the social network X that “something very strange” is currently happening, as ordinary users from all over the world began to complain about the appearance of a “blue screen of death” on their Windows computers. followed by the computer going into recovery mode.
Why there was a global IT failure
Cybersecurity engineers began to point out a problem with antivirus software from Microsoft – Crowdstrike. Several major publications have also reported that at least some of the problems stemmed from CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software.
The “blue screen of death” began to appear on the computers of corporate clients and private users. Source Photo: habr.com
At the same time, Microsoft itself did not provide any accurate information and limited itself to only a short message that it was studying the situation, as reported by Bloomberg. Crowdstrike technical support was not available at all after hours, including users being unable to reach its main number in Japan.
Microsoft subsequently confirmed that the system issues were due to a glitch in work of CrowdStrike. As it turned out, the cause of the failure was a CrowdStrike software update. The update contained a bug that caused problems when interacting with Microsoft services. It’s hard to imagine what Microsoft’s neural network is capable of, even if the company’s antivirus caused global chaos.
System administrators of the affected IT systems reported that they had found a solution to the problem without waiting for the developers to fix the software bugs. After they started shutting down the servers with CrowdStrike, the computers and IT infrastructure of corporate users started working again. An even more interesting solution to the problem was renaming the folder along the path «c:windowssystem32driverscrowdstrike».
This is what self-service checkouts looked like in many supermarkets around the world. Photo source: habr.com
The global IT failure did not affect Russia?
According to the Ministry of Digital Development, the global technical failure did not affect Russia. Domestic carriers continued to operate flights as usual, and there were no problems with registration and purchasing tickets. According to representatives of Domodedovo Airport, the company was not affected by the failure; moreover, the airport is ready to offer partners the use of the backup system «Astra» in case of global software failures. As for Microsoft applications, they left Russia back in 2022.
There were also no reports of problems related to the global outage from Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In these countries, airports, communications, banks and other companies are operating as usual.
Passengers at Sydney airport couldn't even buy food. Photo source: bbc.com
Microsoft Corporation reported that the situation was gradually stabilizing; it took several hours to fix the problem. Currently, the consequences of the failure have been eliminated in all countries.
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Finally, let us remind you that the last A major disruption to online services was caused by damaged cables in the Red Sea. As we previously told, this area is the most vulnerable to the Internet. However, there has never been such a large-scale failure due to an antivirus application update in history.