The issue that plagued a number of Windows PCs and several Microsoft products appears to be a more global problem. Among those affected by the CrowdStrike update fault also include banks in the Philippines like BPI, BDO, and RCBC, and even major institutions abroad.
The outage was so bad, that UK broadcaster Sky News experienced issues broadcasting their morning new bulletins, while European Airline Ryanair experienced IT-related issues that impacted flight departures. Even airports in the US,Germany, India are affected by the massive outage–to the extent that an airline in India had to issue hand-written boarding passes like in the early days of air travel.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz made a post on X explaining what happened: they spotted a defect on a single content update that affected hosts using Windows–specifically a kernel level driver that is used to secure Windows machines. This explains why Mac and Linux systems were not affected by the massive outage.
Kurtz also added that what happened is neither a security incident or cyberattack and that they are on top of it in deploying a fix for the said issue. “Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers,” Kurtz explained in his post.
