Mass IT outage hits airlines media and banks

Mass IT outage affects airlines, media and banks worldwide

by Staff Writer 19-07-2024 | 2:54 PM

COLOMBO (News1st);

A raft of global institutions - including major banks, media outlets and airlines - have reported being hit by a mass IT outage.

Millions of Windows users across the globe are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error which is causing the system to suddenly shut down or restart.

In the UK, Sky News channel was off air due to the outages.

A few moments ago Sky News resumed broadcasting but

it's now once again displaying a slate apologising "for the interruption to this broadcast".

Police in the US state of Alaska have reported, external an outage of emergency phone lines.

Posting on Facebook, the state police force says "many 911 and non-emergency call centres are not working correctly across the State of Alaska".

Australia has been particularly hard hit with flights grounded, supermarkets experiencing checkout chaos, and broadcast networks left scrambling on air as autocue, graphics and computers failed.

Microsoft in a message said that the error is being caused due to a recent CrowdStrike update.

According to foreign media, CrowdStrike said in a recorded message “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,”

Microsoft said its outage started with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

When inquired by News1st regarding the impact to Sri Lanka Senior engineer Charuka Damunupola said the activities of several banks in Sri Lanka were also affected.

He said however the relevant banks have not officially informed Sri Lanka CERT regarding outages thus far.