Updated:Microsoft earlierConfirmIn fact, about 850 million Windows devices were affected worldwide. At the same time, most of them have been resolved, but Microsoft and Crowdstrike are still dealing with other subsequent issues.
Microsoft has been experiencing unstable services since yesterday (July 7), including Microsoft 19, OneNote, OneDrive, SharePoint and other services. Even many PCs, digital signage and checkout systems using the Windows operating system have experienced crashes and restarts, affecting many businesses using Microsoft services. The reason behind this is attributed to the endpoint detection and response (EDR) product software update of the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.
This wave of impact has become the largest cyber incident so far this year. CrowdStrike has only announced that its engineering team is still working on the problem, but has not yet specified the actual cause of the global outage, how it will be resolved, and when the related problems can be improved.
Many people even believe that the impact of this wave is almost equal to the impact originally expected from the "Y2000K crisis" in XNUMX (Note).
Note:The Y2000K crisis, a bug that affected computer systems, which recorded dates in only the last two digits of the year, led to the discovery that after the year 1900, computer systems would misidentify the year as 2000. This impacted computer programs in key industries and the operation of a wide range of social infrastructure, paralyzing urban operations and potentially causing nuclear power plant accidents and military system outages. Ultimately, a massive overhaul prevented a global computer system outage in the year XNUMX.
CrowdStrike, the company that caused the incident, is headquartered in California, USA. It was co-founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston. It is a cybersecurity company that mainly provides client security protection, threat analysis and incident response services, and is well-known for its active detection and defense technologies.
CrowdStrike caused the global impact of Microsoft services.statementThe issue occurred in an Azure regional data center in the central United States and has been addressed.
As for the impact of this incident, not only did many people report that their Microsoft-related services were unable to operate normally, many Windows devices also experienced crashes and restarts. Airlines including American Airlines, United Airlines, Tigerair Taiwan, Jetstar, and Scoot were all affected. At the same time, the computer systems of hospitals such as National Taiwan University Hospital and Taipei Veterans General Hospital were also affected, but some situations have since resumed normal operations.
Omer Grossman, CTO of Israeli information security company CyberArk, estimated that the CrowdStrike issue may prevent remote updates and necessitate manual recovery of endpoints one by one. Therefore, it may take several days for the entire system to return to normal. Therefore, CrowdStrike's problem analysis results and update methods in the next few days will attract much attention.
The impact this time was mainly on Microsoft's services, so it did not affect businesses using other cloud services such as Google Cloud and AWS, or those using operating system platforms such as Mac and Linux. However, since quite a number of businesses currently use Microsoft services, the impact is still quite large.
