One of the biggest-ever IT outages has disrupted companies across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, after what should have been a routine software update cascaded into crisis.
Thousands of flights were cancelled on Friday, workers in cities from Tokyo to London were unable to log on to their computers, hospital operations were postponed and some television channels went off air.
The outage has been blamed on a security update from US group CrowdStrike, which caused a problem with Microsoft’s Windows. PCs and servers are affected, suggesting that millions of computers may need to be fixed for the issue to be resolved.
More than 12 hours after the problems began, some services, including airlines and media groups, had begun to come back online. But the unprecedented scale of the fault means it could take days for every Windows user to recover.
“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” said Troy Hunt, a prominent security consultant, in a social media post. “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
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