Faulty update from cybersecurity company grounded hospitals, airports and payment systems in July A CrowdStrike senior executive apologized for causing a global software outage that ground the operations of hospitals, airports, payment systems and personal computers around the world to a halt in July. Adam Meyers, senior vice-president for counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike, testified before Congress on Tuesday. Meyers will speak to the House homeland security cybersecurity and infrastructure protection subcommittee. In his testimony, he said: “I am here today because, just over two months ago, on July 19, we let our customers down … On behalf of everyone at CrowdStrike, I want to apologize.” He will say the company has undertaken “a full review of our systems” to prevent the cascade of errors from occurring again. Continue reading...

Multiple-day outage caused airline to lose revenue by cancelling and delaying thousands of flights Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, says the airline is facing $500m in costs related to a global tech outage that disrupted emergency services, communications and thousands of businesses. Speaking on CNBC, Bastian said on Wednesday that the monetary amount represents lost revenue as well as “the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels” for the five-day period. Continue reading...

$10 UberEats vouchers sent to people who helped after global IT outage are flagged as potential fraud An attempt by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to thank workers who tackled the recent global IT outage with a $10 UberEats voucher hit a stumbling block after Uber flagged the gesture as potential fraud. CrowdStrike confirmed that it sent the $10 voucher to “teammates and partners” who helped customers affected by a faulty software update it issued. Continue reading...

Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer Parametrix The global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike’s faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again. The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash. Continue reading...

Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm’s outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here “Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question. We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50m. Continue reading...

But experts says full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks A “significant” number of the 8.5m devices affected by last week’s global IT outage are back online, according to the cybersecurity company at the centre of the incident. CrowdStrike said it was also testing a technique to reboot systems more rapidly, amid warnings from experts that a full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks. Continue reading...

Home affairs minister Clare O’Neil says systems should soon be back online but business groups say companies may need days to recover * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, says the company at the centre of the world’s largest ever IT outage has told the federal government it is close to an automatic fix which would allow systems to return online. The global outage on Friday afternoon occurred after the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike updated a widely used cloud-based software product called Falcon. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here There is a further update on the situation at the Port of Dover in England, which was mentioned earlier (see 9.41am BST). Chief executive Doug Bannister told the PA news agency: We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down. The greater visibility we have the better. But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.” We start to get busy about 5 or 5:30 in the morning. We’ve opened new infrastructure today which is working really well. So far there is no congestion in the town of dover. Approach roads are busy but moving. Everything is running well.” The worst of this is over because the nature of the crisis was such that it went very badly wrong, very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly, and essentially, it was turned off.” Until governments and the industry get together and work out how to design out some of these flaws, I’m afraid we are likely to see more of these again. Within countries like the UK and elsewhere in Europe, you can try and build up that national resilience to cope with this. But ultimately, a lot of this is going to be determined in the US. Continue reading...

There has been disruption at airports around the world, as well as banks, supermarkets and media outlets, after Windows workstations were hit by a 'blue screen of death'. Long queues of passengers formed in airports in the UK, US, India and Spain as some airlines warned of delays and grounded flights * Global Microsoft IT outage: latest updates Continue reading...