Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has deployed a fix for an issue that triggered a major tech outage that affected industries ranging from airlines to banking to healthcare worldwide, the company’s CEO said.
Microsoft said separately it had fixed the underlying cause for the outage of its 365 apps and services including Teams and OneDrive, but residual impact was affecting some services.
In a post on social media platform X, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
The issue stemmed from a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts, Mr Kurtz said, adding Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted by the issue.
Shares of CrowdStrike fell nearly 12% in pre-market trading, while Microsoft was down 1.4%.
A massive IT outage disrupted operations at companies across multiple industries, with major airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off air and sectors ranging from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Mr Kurtz told the Today programme on NBC News.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Mr Kurtz said.
“It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover,” he added.
In an alert to clients issued at 6:30am Irish time, CrowdStrike said its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death“.
Over half of Fortune 500 companies used CrowdStrike software, the US firm said in a promotional video this year.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, Professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre.
The travel industry was among the hardest hit with airports around the world reporting delays and issues with their system network, while banks and financial institutions from Australia and India to South Africa warned clients about disruptions to their services.
The outage has also caused disruption across Ireland.
The Road Safety Authority said it is experiencing “significant disruption” due to the global IT outage.
Follow live updates: Global outage hits airports, broadcasters and services