Microsoft IT outage live: CrowdStrike boss apologises as airlines, banks and hospital chaos could last for days

You can read our full report on the outages here.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has said that the IT issue causing a global outage has been identified and that a fix has been deployed.

A statement from Kurtz put out on Friday afternoon confirmed that the outage was not a “security incident or cyber attack.”

“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 statement read.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.

“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.

We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

Air travel may prove to be the worst hit sector in the Microsoft outage, as carriers saw lengthy delays and cancellations with passengers waiting at airports for hours.

Out of more than 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 5,000 were cancelled globally with more expected, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Delta Air Lines was one of the hardest hit, with 20 per cent of its flights cancelled, according to flight tracking service FlightAware. The US carrier said it expected additional delays and cancellations potentially through the weekend.

Airports from Los Angeles to Singapore, Amsterdam and Berlin said airlines were checking in passengers with handwritten boarding passes, causing delays.

In the UK, around 167 flights scheduled to depart airports were axed, with others delayed. Around 171 flights due to land in the UK were cancelled, following the technical glitch.

A spokesperson for Manchester Airport said: “Check-in and boarding for the affected airlines are being carried out manually and are taking longer than normal resulting in some long queues at check-in. “Some flights may be impacted by delays and schedules have been affected by issues caused by the effects of the global IT outage at airports all over the world. This means some flights could be cancelled by airlines at short notice

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz urged people to remain “remain vigilant” against potential scams as systems recover.

In a letter to customers and partners, Kurtz said: “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this.

“I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.”

McAfee, a security software company, said opportunistic scammers are capitalising amid the chaotic situation.

“McAfee has already seen scams, where fraudsters are exploiting the current vulnerabilities to deceive consumers,” the website said in an article.

“These scams range from phishing attacks related to flight rescheduling, to cybercrooks posing as banks to steal login information, and even retailers requesting alternate payment methods.”

More disruptions such as flight delays and cancellations are expected to continue during the weekend after a global IT outage.

Experts have warned it could take weeks for systems to fully recover after a flawed update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many offline around the world on Friday.

Industry expert Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned that it could even take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored.

“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,” he said.

Experts warned users to “remain vigilant” against potential scams as systems recover.

In a letter to customers and partners, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said: “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this.

“I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.”

A group of private sector and government agencies were called together by CrowdStrike to find a solution to the global tech outage, according to the former head of the computer security company McAfee.

Former McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt told CNN said the call was set up by the company and the various organizations worked overnight to determine if there was a potential threat. The call reportedly included the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other private and government organizations.

“This particular release was faulty as admitted by George Kurtz, the CEO, and we then had to replace it,” DeWalt told CNN. “But at that point, the damage had been done, and we now had to move into manual mode.”

He added that some of the companies “spent the entire night deploying thousands of people by hand reloading operating systems, starting servers back up again.”

According to its website, CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity leader, and “has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk — endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.”

Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and advanced AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.

The Falcon platform delivers “rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.”

Class action lawsuits could follow swiftly from the global power outages following billions worth of estimated lost profits, loss of date and economic opportunities, a legal expert has said.

Digital privacy and business law attorney Adam Grant, shareholder at the Los Angeles-based law firm Grant Shenon, said that legal liability, if any, would come down to the actual reason for the crash.

“Software updates are very common. They frequently cause issues. It is not below the standard of care for an update to impact other systems. However, this has been described as the largest computer crash in history,” Grant said, in a statement shared with The Independent.

“I expect there will be great focus on the quality control steps taken to minimize any impact before sending out the update. The claims would likely be based on negligence arising out of what the software company should have known regarding the update.

“I do expect class actions will be filed within a short period of time primarily based on such a theory. The damages will be in the billions and include lost profits, loss of data and loss economic opportunities and reputation repair.”