Y2K24: Microsoft outage plunges airports, banks and even Xbox into the IT Dark Ages
Disastrous Crowdstrike IT outage affects services on a global scale as companies try to reboot and get back online
⛓️💥 Microsoft IT systems are offline globally with a Blue Screen of Death error
🌐 A failed CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software update is to blame
❌ It’s affecting hospitals, banks, airports, TV broadcasters and Xbox
⚔️ Y2K24 as Microsoft IT outage plunges everyone into the Dark Ages
Welcome to Y2K24, which is inviting a lot of the panic today that we expected more than 24 years ago in the year 2000. If you’re experiencing problems, you’re not alone.
A global outage for Windows machines is resulting in a “Blue Screen of Death,” taking offline hospitals, banks, airports, TV broadcasters, and small to large businesses worldwide. Even Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has been affected.
The root cause of the problem is a bug in software from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that issued a faulty update in Microsoft PCs and servers worldwide. CrowdStrike has admitted there’s a defect in the single content update for Windows host that is currently knocking PCs and servers offline. Basically, if you’ve ever downloaded a bad BIOs update and seen it brick your PC, that’s what’s happened here – except recovery is much harder and on a massive scale.
Rebooting cloud-based PCs is hard
The only recovery solution currently is to reboot machines into safe mode, allowing admins to dive into the CrowdStrike directory and delete the afflicting system file. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, that’s a troublesome process even with a machine in front of you and this bug affects thousands of cloud-based servers and remotely deployed Windows PCs. The cloud is great except when everything goes wrong.
The effects of this outage are rampant. So far, we’ve seen real-world videos of airports with BSOD screens across the entire floor. Meanwhile, Sky News has been effectively shut down and has been unable to broadcast its news programs.
Here’s an extensive list of the companies affected by the world’s biggest IT outage in history:
United Airlines
Delta Airlines
American Airlines
Frontier Airlines
Ryanair (UK)
911 Emergency System (USA)
National Health Care System (UK)
Amazon
Visa
Chase Bank
Charles Schwab
Bank of America
TD Bank
NAB (Australia)
Commonwealth (Australia)
Bendigo (Australia)
ASB (New Zealand)
Kiwibank (New Zealand)
Telstra (Australia)
Quickbook
CBS News
Sky News
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Washington D.C., USA)
Metropolitan Transit Authority (NYC, USA)
Great Northern Rail (UK)
Department of Motor Vehicles
McDonald’s (Japan)
Starbucks
Woolworths (Australia)
ADT Security
IT outage has terrible timing
Today is one of the worst days of the week for this Microsoft IT outage to happen. On Friday, a lot of business travelers return home from conferences and meetings (Friday counts as an on-the-clock travel day vs Saturday when that’s on employees’ time).
At the same time, you have a lot of people getting an early start to vacations, flying out on Friday morning – a lot of them didn’t make it. So photos of people stuck at the airport began to clog our social media feeds – the ones that continued to work.
Fixing the Crowdstrike error is ongoing, but the impact of today’s delays – and the money lost – is going to have severe implications for weeks to come. Even as some backend IT systems and services come back online (Xbox Game Pass is live again), others are going to be in recovery for all of July. Case in point: your Starbucks mobile orders remains in limbo right now.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
The caption under the first photo says "January".