At 4am this warning began to appear. crowdstrike performed a software update to Microsoft servers. The result of this terrible performance is worldwide interruptions to any Microsoft dependent company. Airlines in particular are hit as noted below.

More to come but we have to ask why always Microsoft and Crowdstrike.

Global Tech Outage Grounds Flights and Hits Businesses. Airlines, banks and broadcasters were among the companies around the world reporting disruptions, citing technical issues.
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In other European cities, including Zurich, Paris and Berlin, hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled. At Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport, Germany’s third busiest, flights were canceled for three hours, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., before they started to resume. About 15 percent of flights departing from Brandenburg Airport had been canceled, according to FlightAware. At Manchester Airport in England, there were long lines in the departures area and only a few of a dozen or so check-in computers were working. Announcements broadcast over the public address system said “worldwide” outages had caused the delays.

The outage was expected to effect later flights around the world. At Narita International Airport in Japan, some passengers said they were disappointed and frustrated to receive automated texts from United Airlines that their flights were boarding, when instead they were delayed

Flight delays and cancellations have a cascading effect because airport landing slots are limited and crews often work multiple trips in a day. When flights are cancelled, pilots and flight attendants may not be able to get to their next trip, requiring airlines to start assigning backup crews to those flights. Carriers routinely deal with such last-minute changes, but such disruptions can quickly overwhelm even the most prepared airlines.

Crowdstrike

Until Friday morning, many people had either not heard of — or were not thinking about — CrowdStrike. But as flights were canceled, broadcasters went off air, trains did not run and medical procedures were delayed around the world, its name quickly spread around the internet.

So, what is it?

CrowdStrike, which was founded in 2011, is a cloud-based cybersecurity platform whose software is used by scores of industries around the world to protect against hackers and outside breaches.

“Once CrowdStrike is installed, it actively scans for threats on your machine without having to manually run virus scans,” according to an explanation on the University of Denver’s website, which offers the platform to students and staff.

Cybersecurity software like CrowdStrike’s has broad privileges to run across a computer system, including into sensitive areas. That means when errors occur, the ripple effect can be significant.

CrowdStrike updates its security software automatically and silently. It seems that a flawed update on Friday morning, of its Falcon Sensor software, resulted in crashes of machines running Microsoft Windows operating system and caused the worldwide chaos.

In a posting on X, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, confirmed that the outage was not “security incident or cyberattack.”

An updated fix of the software has been sent to computers, but Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant, said outages would probably persist because it was not clear how to fix computers that had already been affected.

It is not the first time CrowdStrike is in the news: Its analysts investigated the data breach of the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and determined that two groups of Russian operatives had breached a DNC server.