A global IT outage caused major infrastructure across the world to grind to a halt on Friday.
Institutions ranging from airports to GP surgeries suffered disruption after their computer systems were taken offline.
CrowdStrike, the firm at the centre of the outage, said it was “deeply sorry” for the incident but warned it would take “some time” for systems to be fully restored.
What happened?
CrowdStrike confirmed the issue was caused by a “defect in a single content update for Windows hosts”. In other words, this was a flaw in a software update pushed out to customers using Microsoft Windows PCs, which crashed.
CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers, providing antivirus and cyberattack prevention tools to thousands of businesses.
Read more: Microsoft has serious questions to answer after what could be the biggest IT outage in history (Sky News)
What was affected?
The NHS was at the centre of the outage in England, as it caused disruption “in the majority of GP practices” as well as pharmacies. Several ambulance services reported increased…
