Stock Exchanges Unaffected By Global Outage

Bangalore Airport Update

“The Technical Glitch is completeley gone. Operation is normal. Slight congestion at the Airport is the impact of yesterday’s operational delay “

Australia’s cyber intelligence agency said on Saturday that “malicious websites and unofficial code” were being released online claiming to aid recovery from Friday’s global digital outage, which hit media, retailers, banks and airlines.

Australia was one of many countries affected by the outage that caused havoc worldwide after a botched software update from CrowdStrike.

On Saturday, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) – the country’s cyber intelligence agency – said “a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident”.

On its website, the agency said its cyber security centre “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only”.

Tesla halted some production lines due to the global IT outage, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The automaker sent some production employees home early during the night shift at its Austin, Texas and Sparks, Nevada facilities, the report added.

The tech outage crippled industries from travel to finance before services started coming back online after hours of disruption due a content update by CrowdStrike for Microsoft Windows hosts.

Air passengers around the United States faced delays, while some airlines halted flight operations as Microsoft-based computers ceased to work after a global outage on Friday.

Many airports across the US experienced unexpected disruption with over 1,100 flights getting cancelled and over 1,700 flights operating behind schedule on Friday morning (local time) after certain cloud services of Microsoft were disrupted.

These disruptions gave a hard time to people flying to and from different airports across the US, with many of them expressing their frustration over the unexpected delays and cancellations of flights.

From fearmongering about a looming “World War III” to false narratives linking a cabal of global elite to a cyberattack, a torrent of online conspiracy theories took off Friday after a major IT crash.

Airlines, banks, TV channels and financial institutions were engulfed in turmoil after the crash, one of the biggest in recent years that was the result of a faulty software update to an antivirus program operating on Microsoft Windows.

The proliferation of internet-breaking conspiracy theories on social media platforms — many of which have removed guardrails that once contained the spread of misinformation — illustrates the new normal of information chaos after a major world event.

Some external vendors that police content on Facebook owner Meta’s platforms were affected by the global tech outage that crippled airports, banks and hospitals on Friday, a Meta spokesperson said in response to a Reuters query.

The social media giant experienced a SEV1 as a result of the disruptions, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, using Meta’s term for a “code red”-style alert involving high-stakes problems with its systems that require urgent attention.

In a statement, the Meta spokesperson acknowledged the issues and said they had been resolved earlier in the day

Catastrophic computer outages caused by a software update from one company have once again exposed the dangers of global technological dependence on a handful of players, experts warned on Friday.

A flawed update sent out by the little-known security firm CrowdStrike brought airlines, TV stations, and myriad other aspects of daily life to a standstill. 

The outages affected companies or individuals that use CrowdStrike on the Microsoft Windows platform: when they applied the update, the incompatible software crashed computers into a frozen state known as the “Blue Screen of Death.”

“Today CrowdStrike has become a household name, but not in a good way, and this will take time to settle down,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.

The breakdown quickly fueled discussions about internet giants’ power over the increasingly digital world economy, with more activity now taking place in the computing “cloud” or on a few apps or platforms. 

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is the leader in its sector, known for building software defenses for the cloud computing age and exposing Russian and North Korean threats.

Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston.

Both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive backgrounds in cybersecurity, working at companies like McAfee. 

Two years after its founding, CrowdStrike launched its signature product, the Falcon platform.