RED ALERT. THIS IS A BLACK SWAN EVENT.
Global economy crippled by digital pandemic: IT outage could last days
It remains unclear how widespread the payroll disruption is, but Melanie Pizzey, the founder and CEO of GPA said her company had received complaints from a number of clients who couldn’t access their payroll software because of the outage.
Payroll systems typically need to be notified of any issues that would stop direct deposits from going through at least two days before the payday for the issue to be resolved in time.
Depending on the length of this outage, it could have very serious implications for businesses across the nation, particularly those who process payroll on a weekly basis,’‘ Pizzey said.
‘Furthermore, we could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage.’
George Kurtz, the CEO of the software company whose bug caused the issues, said it could be weeks before systems are back up and running.
Meanwhile, issues with Visa and Zelle are not allowing people to make or receive payments, and there’s no estimated timeframe for when they’ll be back up and running.
The outage first started with Microsoft, leading many people to believe that the company’s systems were at fault, but within hours, Crowdstrike admitted that an update to its ‘Falcon Sensor,’ which searches for viruses and malicious attacks was to blame.
h/t News Hound