Software bug causes worldwide IT chaos
‘Robust Iranian systems not affected’
Airlines, banks, TV channels and other business across the globe were scrambling Friday to deal with one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program. Aviation officials in the United States briefly grounded all planes, while airlines elsewhere cancelled or delayed flights, as systems running Microsoft Windows crashed, AFP reported.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting users of its Azure cloud platform running cybersecurity software CrowdStrike Falcon.
“We recommend customers that are able to, to restore from a backup from before this time,” the US software giant said in a technical update on its website.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post on several social media platforms that a fix had been rolled out for the problem, describing it as a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”.
Experts suggested applying the fix would not be straightforward.
And the global nature of the failure prompted some commentators to question the reliance on a single provider for such a variety of services.
Shares in CrowdStrike slumped by 20 percent in pre-market trading.
From Amsterdam to Zurich, Singapore to Hong Kong, airport operators flagged technical issues that were disrupting their services.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a notice to airlines early on Friday that all flights “regardless of destination” were to be grounded.
Turkish Airlines said it had cancelled 84 flights and other airlines reported booking systems had crashed.
Reports from both the Netherlands and Britain suggested health services may have been affected by the disruption, meaning the impact could
eventually be even wider.
Media companies were also struggling, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had ended its morning news broadcasts and Australia’s ABC similarly reporting a major “outage”.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported difficulties with some digital services, supermarkets in Australia had issues with payments, mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.
Robust Iranian system
Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace (SCC) said in a statement on Friday that the country does not use Microsoft services due to sanctions as domesticized systems have been replaced from a long time ago, and so far, we have not had any reports of service outages.
The SCC was monitoring from the early hours of the global outage in Microsoft services to have a detailed assessment of disruptions to manage the situation, but no halt in providing services to people has been reported so far.
“Iran was banned from receiving these services years ago due to Western sanctions, and with the initiatives of Iranian elites, local alternative services have been designed which are now operational,” read the statement. Iran’s capabilities in the field of providing domestic cloud services enables the country to export such services, as the ground is paved to transfer experience or export products in this field.
Meanwhile, Saeid Chalandari, the CEO of the Imam Khomeini Airport City said that the flights of the airport were carried out on Friday without any problem.
In order to reduce dependences, the IKAC has been using domestically-developed software to check-in passengers, the official noted.