The chaos was due to a defect in a single content update by Crowdstrike, a US-based cybersecurity firm used by Microsoft, the company shared at 5:30am ET.
Crowdstrike assured the public that the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity attack and that it could take up to 36 hours to fix, analysts told DailyMail.com
What happened?
The global computer outage first started with Microsoft, leading people to believe that the company’s systems were to blame, but Crowdstrike was found to be at fault a few hours later.
Crowdstrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity specialist, provides software to 29,000 businesses and industries to protect their online systems against cyberattacks and security breaches.
The Microsoft outage was triggered by a bug in Crowdstrike’s software update, which was deployed to its ‘Falcon Sensor,’ which searches for viruses and malicious attacks.
‘One of the tricky parts of security software is it needs to have absolute privileges over your entire computer in order to do its job,’ Thomas Parenty, a cybersecurity consultant and former National Security Agency analyst told the New York Times.
‘So if there’s something wrong with it, the consequences are vastly greater than if your spreadsheet doesn’t work.’
The incident impacted Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service that are used by more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and eight of the top financial institutions across 43 US states.
Microsoft 365 is a cloud-powered platform that helps businesses protect against cyber threats and keep information secure and private for shared files and email messages and links.
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