The confirmation comes after widespread reports of technical issues around the world.
Microsoft said on Friday that its cloud services have mostly been restored after an outage affecting its cloud apps in the U.S. It is unclear whether the outage was related to the CrowdStrike update.
Separately, however, the CrowdStrike update issue appears to have directly affected Windows systems around the world, with laptops experiencing an error screen known as the “Blue Screen of Death.”
“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,” CrowdStrike said in a recorded phone message.
A number of companies, including airlines, banks, telecommunications companies and banks, reported issues on Friday, but the cause of each problem was not immediately clear.
American Airlines, which describes itself as the world’s largest, said the technical issues were affecting “multiple airlines,” while Air France-KLM’s Dutch arm said it had been “forced to suspend most of its operations.”
Meanwhile, Spain’s airports authority AENA warned travellers to expect delays due to a “computer systems failure”, while British airline Ryanair said the disruptions were caused by a third-party IT issue and advised passengers to arrive at airports at least three hours before their scheduled departure.
Outside the travel industry, banks and finance companies around the world have reported problems, with the London Stock Exchange reporting technical issues with its data and news platform.
German financial giant Allianz said it was “experiencing a major outage affecting employees’ ability to log in to their computers. The outage also affects several other companies in addition to Allianz, specifically Windows logins, and is caused by an incident with our provider CrowdStrike.”
A Visa spokesman said its ability to process payments did not appear to be affected, but that it was “aware of reports of some people being unable to make payments and is working with its financial institution customers to understand the impact to service to cardholders and merchants.”
NBCUniversal was also affected by the CrowdStrike outage.
For the latest information on affected companies, please click here.
Omar Grossman, chief information officer at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, said the impact of the outage would be “enormous.”
“The issue is due to a software update to CrowdStrike’s EDR product, which runs with elevated privileges to protect endpoints. When this fails, as seen in this incident, it can cause the operating system to crash,” he said in an emailed statement.
Getting back online won’t be easy, Grossman said.
“We discovered that because the endpoints were crashing (blue screens), they could not be updated remotely and would have to be fixed manually on each endpoint. We expect this process to take several days,” he added.
This is breaking news, please refresh to see the latest.
