Microsoft meltdown will cost global economy TRILLIONS & it ‘could drag on for weeks’
THE global IT meltdown will cost the global economy trillions and could drag on for weeks, experts have warned.
The outage caused worldwide chaos today after an error by cyber security firm Crowdstrike hit Microsoft systems.
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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 and infrastructure 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 3,300 flights were cancelled globally with over 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. 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.
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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”, adding: “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
How the tech crisis was caused
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 $80 billion 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 $10 billion (£7.7 billion) off the company in an instant.
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