Today’s (19 July 2024) IT outage is a vivid reminder of the cybersecurity risks faced by airlines and, indeed, the entire world. The COVID-19 pandemic, reportedly caused by a virus leak in a lab, showed that every (eco)system is vulnerable. What matters is resilience.
As businesses become more digital, the question is not if but when a global IT virus will strike and paralyze the economy. Such an unprecedented event may impact every IT system far more extensively than today’s outage. We will then find out how resilient the global IT infrastructure is.
Let’s use today’s outage to rethink our IT systems for resilience to cyberthreats. In the meantime, a few points on today’s outage:
👉 The cause is known: a bug in a cybersecurity tool developed by Crowdstrike and used by Microsoft systems. The bug caused the tool to wrongly identify processes as threats, leading Windows systems to failures or crashes (“Blue Screen of Death” 😱).
👉 About CrowdStrike: is US publicly-listed company, founded in 2021, and leader in cybersecurity ($2.73B in ARR). Its key product, Falcon, involved in the outage, provides “endpoint” (computers, mobiles, etc.) protection from cyber threats.
👉 Major impact: Airlines, airports, banks, TV networks, retail shops and more were impacted today, reporting various types of disruptions. For example easyJet reported a “Global Microsoft IT outage” and longer than usual airport queues.
👉 Recovery: while the bug is reportedly fixed and updates were sent out, some computers may simply need to reboot while others may face more issues. People impacted by the operational issues, such as cancelled flights due to the IT outage, will need time to be rebooked on later flights.
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