A popular anti-virus software called Crowdstrike is said to be responsible for a global outage which has caused issues with transport services in the UK and the NHS – initially thought to be connected to Microsoft due to an unrelated Azure issue in the early hours of the morning.
The outage, which has followed CHAPS payment system collapse affecting property transactions, is seeing companies such as low-cost carrier airline Ryanair, rail network Govia Thameslink and the National Health Service facing major disruption as tech experts attempt to grapple with the problem.
Emergency healthcare hasn’t been affected, with 999 services and 111 still operational across the UK. However, patients and health workers have encountered issues within GP services across the country. Other critical rail networks such as Southern, Gatwick Express and Great Northern are affected and a spokesperson has advised customers to check the line prior to travel.
At first, the outage was blamed on Microsoft, as their Azure platform had an outage in a primary region of the US between the hours of 1am and 5am. Microsoft 365 services were temporarily down and although some devices are still experiencing issues these are largely resolved.
Crowdstrike have yet to comment or release a statement, but their director Brody Nisbet has posted a ‘fix’ for customers on social media platform Reddit on their dedicated vendors page – according to media outlet The Register. The boss wrote on X calling the situation ‘a mess’, but did not fully confirm the issue – said to be a ‘faulty channel file’. Reversal work has been done but it has not restored IT services to their previous working order yet.
What is Crowstrike?
Crowdstrike is a popular security service with over 12,000 large customers worldwide. The business is valued at $80billion. It has a product called Falcon that it uses to detect threats that would possibly been misconfigured, according to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre’s former CEO Ciaran Martin speculated on a Radio 4 interview earlier today.
