CrowdStrike update crashes Windows systems, causes outages worldwide

By Ionut Ilascu, Bleeping Computer

A faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update is crashing Windows systems, impacting various organizations and services across the world, including airports, TV stations, and hospitals.

The glitch is affecting Windows workstations and servers, with users reporting massive outages that took offline entire companies and fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers.

According to some reports, emergency services in the U.S. and Canada have also been impacted.

Worldwide outage

By the time of the correction, though, many large organizations across multiple verticals had already been affected.

Some reports say that CrowdStrike’s update impacted some 911 emergency service agencies in the state of New York (EMS, police, fire department), Alaska, and Arizona, as well as 911 services in parts of Canada.

A 911 telecommunicator in Illinois said that they were “working off of paper until things come back.”

There also reports that the health hotline in Catalonia, Spain, is impacted and authorities are asking citizens not to call 061 unless there is an emergency.

Dutch broadcasting organization NOS said that the glitch created disruptions at Schiphol Airport and “forced several flights to be grounded” (operated by KLM and Transavia).

Melbourne Airport said that it was experiencing “a global technology issue which is impacting check-in procedures for some airlines.” The most affected are passengers departing internationally via Jetstar and Scoot airlines.

Other airports affected are in Berlin, Barcelona, Brisbane, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and London.

A few hours ago, in the latest update, the Zurich Airport says that "flights with destination Zurich that are already in the air are still allowed to land," no aircrafts "are currently taking off for Zurich Airport," and there are no departures to the U.S.

Furthermore, there are delays and cancellations and passengers of individual airlines must be checked in manually.

In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration received requests to assist multiple airlines (American Airlines, United, Delta) with ground stops until "a technical issue impacting IT systems" is resolved.

Some hospitals in the Netherlands - Scheper in Emmen, Slingeland Hospital in Achterhoek, and emergency posts in Hoogeveen and Stadskanaal were also impacted.

In Barcelona, the Terrassa University Hospital and the Catalan Oncology Institute experienced issues earlier today due to the CrowdStrike issue but have started to return to normal activity.

On Friday morning, multiple television stations and news outlets, such as Sky News and ABC suffered disruptions as computers crashed.

Despite a fix being deployed and CrowdStrike providing a workaround for Windows hosts already crashing, companies will feel the effects from the issue for a while.

Admins are going to have a long weekend, especially with computer fleets of tens or hundreds of thousands of computers, employees working remotely, off-premise data centers, or cloud environments where booting in safe mode is not an option.