Major IT outage brings businesses around the world to a standstill

AAPPP / Shutterstock by Alan Woodward, University of Surrey A major IT outage has hit businesses across the world, grounding planes as well as affecting banks and the healthcare sector. George Kurtz, CEO of IT security firm Crowdstrike, said it had traced the issue to a “defect found in a single content update” for the security software it provides for the Microsoft Windows operating system on computers. Microsoft said the issue was caused by an “update from a third-party software platform” and that the “underlying cause” had now been fixed. The Conversation spoke to Professor Alan Woodward, an expert in cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, about what went wrong and how the problem could be resolved. Can you explain what’s happened here? I think there are two things. First, Microsoft seems to have had a problem with its Azure cloud computing platform. It’s a bit unclear, but there was a degree of degradation in that service starting in the evening of 18 July. However, it didn’t fail altogether. But by far the bigger problem seems to be an update that appears to have been done in the late evening of July 18 for [IT security company] Crowdstrike’s Falcon product...