THE Microsoft meltdown will cost the global economy trillions and could drag on for weeks, experts have warned.
The IT outage caused worldwide chaos on Friday after an error by cyber security firm Crowdstrike hit Microsoft systems.
The estimated global cost of internet disruption for 20 hours is a massive $24billion – or £18billion.
One expert branded the meltdown the “most serious IT outage the world has ever seen”.
Another claimed the cost to the global economy – on one of the busiest days for travel since Covid – was set to run into the trillions.
Industry expert Adam Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned that it could even take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored.
He said: “The fix will have to be applied to many computers around the world.
“So if computers are getting blue screens and endless loops it could be more difficult and take days and weeks.”
The meltdown affected an array of businesses including planes, trains, hospital, GPs, banks, cafes and shops around the world.
The chaos comes on what is set to be busiest day for flights in five years as the school holidays get underway for summer.
A whopping 5,000 flights were cancelled globally with more than 100 canned in the UK alone.
Television channels, banks, GPs and supermarkets around the world have been rocked by the chaos.
Shops in Australia either had to shut down or go cashless after digital checkouts stopped working.
In the US, emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
Researcher Kevin Beaumont said: “As systems no longer start impacted systems will need to be started in ‘Safe Mode’ to remove the faulty update.
“This is incredibly time-consuming and will take organisations days to do at scale.
HOW THE TECH CRISIS WAS CAUSED
By Ashley Armstrong
A MINOR tech tweak has been blamed for the world’s biggest IT outage.
Experts have warned that yesterday’s disaster highlights how reliant modern society is on technology and how vulnerable it is to glitches.
The “blue screen of death” on many Microsoft Windows computers was caused by a software update from a US cyber security firm called CrowdStrike.
Microsoft said that Windows devices running the CrowdStriek software “may encounter a bug check (BSOD [blue screen of death]) and get stuck in a restarting state”.
CrowdStrike, valued at over $80billion before yesterday’s crisis, counts 29,000 companies as customers including schools, hospitals, supermarkets, airlines and banks.
The firm was quick to confirm the chaos was not caused by a cyber attack, but an update to its software.
When CrowdStrike’s software, called Falcon Sensor, was sent out automatically to its customers there was an error in the coding which meant Microsoft computers would not restart.
The issues did not impact Apple Mac computers.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, said the cause of the problems was a “defect found in a single content update for Windows”.
CrowdStrike’s security software is meant to detect viruses and online threats and is meant to block them.
Yesterday it said that it was rolling back the update to the software.
Shares in the Austin, Texas based company plunged by 14 per cent as soon as US markets opened, wiping $10billion (£7.7billion) off the company in an instant.
“Essentially we have one of the world’s highest impact IT incidents caused by a cyber-security vendor.”
Fellow tech experts have compared the chaos to the scale expected from Y2K or the Millennium Bug.
Esteemed security consultant Troy Hunt posted on social media: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
Cybersecurity software firm CrowdStrike say they have identified the issue behind the global outage as a flawed anti-viral update.
The firm is reportedly used by Microsoft to handle various updates to their systems.
In a statement on social media, CrowdStrike said the global IT outage was “not a security incident or cyberattack”.
It added: “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
What is CrowdStrike?
THE global cyber outage affecting TV channels, banks, hospitals, airports and emergency services appears to relate to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
IT security firm CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday – saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.
A prerecorded message said: “Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support.
“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows… related to the Falcon sensor.”
The Falcon system monitors the computers it is installed on and detects hacks and bugs before responding to them.
CrowdStrike, headquartered in Austin, Texas, says it is a global security leader which provides an advanced platform to protect data.
A CrowdStrike update on Friday is said to have caused a critical error in Microsoft operating systems, affecting millions worldwide.
The company regularly updates systems with new anti-virus software
Toby Murray, associate professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, Australia said: “If Falcon is suffering a malfunction then it could be causing a widespread outage for two reasons .
“One: Falcon is widely deployed on many computers, and two: because of Falcon’s privileged nature.
“Falcon is a bit like anti-virus software: it is regularly updated with information about the latest online threats.
“It is possible that today’s outage may have been caused by a buggy update to Falcon.”.
Cyber expert Troy Hunt told Australian TV network Seven: “It looks like they’ve pushed a bad update, which is presently nuking every machine that takes it.”
