CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm specialising in software for managing IT security, experienced a significant drop in its stock price on Friday following a major outage that affected businesses globally. The company's shares plummeted by 14 per cent in US premarket trading.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which faced issues impacting its Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps, saw its shares decline by 2 per cent in premarket trading.
On Friday, a widespread global technological outage affected operations at airlines, banks, and the London Stock Exchange (LSE), causing a ripple effect of failures spanning from the United States to Asia. These issues followed Microsoft Corp.'s announcement of an outage impacting its online services, as reported by multiple media outlets.
Approximately six hours after the outage was initially reported, Microsoft tweeted that “Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress."
It was later reported that this worldwide Microsoft outage was caused by a buggy update attributed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor malfunctioning and conflicting with the Windows system.
Windows users globally are facing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), causing sudden computer shutdowns and restarts. This issue is causing data loss and disruptions for millions of users. The BSOD presents a message stating: "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some error info, and then we'll restart for you." These errors, referred to as black screen errors or STOP code errors, occur when a critical issue forces Windows to shut down or restart unexpectedly.
Meanwhile, in a tweet, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister of MEITY, announced that the cause of the outage has been identified, updates have been deployed to address the issue, and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is issuing a technical advisory. "MEITY is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue. CERT is issuing a technical advisory. NIC network is not affected," he wrote on X.