CrowdStrike IT outage affects Australian banks, flights and media outlets

Crowdstrike It outage: Devices at the ABC, Foxtel, the Commonwealth Bank and many more have been impacted by blue screens of death on Windows PCs around the country.

On Friday afternoon, there was a worldwide IT outage that affected banks, airlines, mining, and media businesses. The disruption caused systems to go down and prevented employees from accessing their devices. It looks like a number of businesses are affected, including Woolworths, Deloitte, Qantas, and Nine. It is believed that a malicious patch update from the multinational cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is the cause of the issue.

Many websites have had disruptions as a result of the problem. Users of the Down Detector website have reported outages to a number of significant Australian websites, including the ABC, the Big Four banks, Foxtel, Telstra, and the NBN, to mention a few. It was revealed that the problem started earlier this afternoon based on an internal email from the ABC.

The email from ABC states, “Windows workstations experiencing BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) nationally.” “There is an ongoing investigation underway to determine the cause of this.” “ABC Television content is presently airing, despite technical difficulties at several news studios. The Windows PCs that transfer ABC Radio outputs to air are offline, as are a number of radio studios around the nation.

On the other hand, the outage seems to be worldwide, and a Reddit thread claims that a CrowdStrike upgrade is to blame. “Hi there, everybody – There have been numerous complaints of BSODs on Windows hosts that happen on various sensor versions. looking into the reason. TA will be released soon,” a member posted on the r/crowdstrike site.

In a user message board, CrowdStrike allegedly recognized the issue and stated that it was looking into the root of it. Michelle McGuinness, the National Cyber Security Coordinator, has verified that the Windows outage that has been impacting Australians in a variety of organizations is not a cyberattack. Lieutenant General McGuinness stated, “I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon.”

As of right now, we know that the outage is related to a technical problem with a third-party software platform that the impacted organizations use. “No information indicates that this is a cybersecurity incident. We keep interacting with important stakeholders.

Numerous journalists from Nine’s publications said that their laptops abruptly crashed and showed the message, “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart,” on a blue screen. After gathering some error information, we’ll restart for you. Since they could not access pre-packaged news pieces, Channel Nine in Melbourne was forced to improvise the opening of its 4pm news bulletin. Thus far, businesses who do not utilize the CrowdStrike software have not been impacted.

An update from CrowdStrike was posted on Reddit. “CrowdStrike Engineering has discovered a content deployment associated with this problem and undone the modifications. While Tesserent, a cyber security company, is developing a patch of its own:

Late this afternoon, Tesserent announced, “Tesserent, cyber solutions by Thales is aware of an issue, in which devices running Microsoft Windows and CrowdStrike are displaying a “blue screen” (BSOD) error and trying to reboot.”

CrowdStrike has verified that this problem is related to a falcon sensor. Though there isn’t much information at this time, CrowdStrike is looking into it quickly. “Once resolution plans are available, the Tesserent Security Operations Center will notify clients of managed services and keep an eye on the situation.”