Flights Grounded, Businesses Disrupted Worldwide Due to Outages

On Friday, massive online outages disrupted travel, banking and news outlets worldwide. Some blamed a recent update to a popular cybersecurity software.

Key Details: CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company whose software is used by industries worldwide to protect against breaches, went down and caused global communications issues. The outage reportedly occurred when the CrowdStrike system was sent an update that had a software bug in it. The Federal Aviation Administration is "closely monitoring" the technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines.

Key Quote: "The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," George Kurtz, the president and CEO of CrowdStrike, posted on X. "We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website." Kutz also stated that "this is not a security incident or cyberattack."

For Context: Some sources suggest this may be the largest IT outage in history, and officials do not yet know how long it will take to fully resolve the problem.

How the Media Covered it: The New York Times (Lean left bias) reported that the outage is an example of what can happen when the global economy has a fragile dependence on certain software. Fox Business (Lean Right bias) and many others noted that the outage was separate from a problem Microsoft faced overnight with its cloud services.