Rehearsal for the apocalypse: Crowdstrike antivirus update led to a global IT failure

A large-scale failure of computer systems occurred this morning around the world, Bloomberg reports. Among the victims are banks, television companies and food chains, as well as other institutions and services.

A global outage is also observed at the world's airports - flights are canceled, and instead of the usual information, blue messages about restoring the Windows system are displayed on the screens.

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_{According to Bloomberg McDonald's Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and LSE Group were among the largest companies to report various problems with communication with customer service. Many corporations from Japan to India, Europe and South America were affected.}

The first outages appeared in the United States late Thursday evening, and they are associated with failures in Microsoft services, including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines suspended flights for more than two hours. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is looking into the situation.

_{The LSE group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said it was facing a global technical problem preventing the publication of news.}

In Asia, Japanese users began to report disruptions to services, in particular Microsoft 365. Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports returned to manual check-in of passengers.

Sky News also said it had temporarily stopped broadcasting due to technical problems.

In Ukraine, among the victims are the Nova Poshta company and the mobile operator Vodafone.

_{The American antivirus company Crowdstrike confirmed that the massive failure occurred due to an update to their antivirus and Windows system. The company's shares plummeted 11% after a massive IT failure and continue to fall in price.}

Against this backdrop, shares of Crowdstrike, the culprit of the global outage, plummeted 12%, while Microsoft's fell by almost 3%. One Reddit user wrote, "The sum of everything Crowdstrike could have prevented is probably less than the damage they just caused."

According to official data, Russia was not affected by the failure due to the use of other cyber defense systems and the move away from Microsoft Azure. Sberbank stated that their services are operating as usual.