What to do during a global tech outage

Parts of the world came to a standstill on Friday when there was a global Windows outage.

The technology global outage affected Airline companies, airports, banks, telecommunication companies, and television and radio broadcasters across the world.

A cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike was the reason for the disturbance. George Kurtz, CrowdStrike founder and CEO says the outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Leading to major tech failures around the world.

How did the global outage happen

Kurtz reassured the public that this was not a cyberattack. CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity firm launched in 2011, based in Austin, Texas. It is explained to provide endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.

When CrowdStrike set Falcon software to update, it caused a malfunction that disabled parts of computer systems and software that it interacts with. The affected computer systems and software included Microsoft’s Windows products.

ALSO READ: Capitec, Airlink hit by Microsoft global outage

Parts of the world affected by the outage

Those affected included Microsoft users in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom (UK), Australia and India. Sky News in the UK and ABC in Australia were also affected.

In South Africa, Capetic Bank users were also affected. As the bank informed them it is experiencing a nationwide service issue including cards. It later told its clients that the issue is an international issue, affecting multiple banks and retailers.

Those who were supposed to make use of Airlink Airlines in South Africa were not able to do so. The airline informed its clients that it had also been affected by the global outage. Flights were not able to take off as the airline’s IT network, including telephone lines was down.

ALSO READ: ACSA says airports unaffected by Microsoft global outage 

How to fix the issue

Cybersecurity Kaspersky has since released tips to help corporate users how to fix the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in case of another outage. Users would need to manually reboot their computers in Safe Mode, and this is usually impossible to do in large corporations without the help of a system administrator.

Step-by-step instructions are;

Boot your computer in Safe Mode;

Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike;

Locate and delete the csagent.sys or C-00000291*.sys file;

Restart your computer in normal mode.

ALSO READ: Microsoft working on global outages, Capitec says banking services restored

How the ‘failure’ could have been avoided

Kaspersky says the update should not have been released on a Friday. They describe this as a rule known in the industry. The reason for the rule is if an error occurs, there is too little time to fix it before the weekend, so the system administrators at all companies affected need to work over the weekend to fix things.

As with cybersecurity incidents, in addition to fixing the visible damage, you need to find the root cause to prevent these types of problems from repeating in the future. It’s necessary to check software updates on test infrastructure for operability and errors before rolling them out to the company’s “combat” infrastructure and to implement changes gradually — continually monitoring for possible failures.