“COMMON CAUSE”
Companies were left patching up their systems and trying to assess the damage from the outage, even as officials tried to tamp down any panic.
“There is no evidence to suggest that this outage is the result of a cyberattack,” France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said.
German interior ministry spokesman Mehmet Ata blamed it on CrowdStrike’s “faulty update”.
CrowdStrike’s Kurtz said his teams were “fully mobilised” to help customers affected.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said.
But Professor Oli Buckley of Britain’s Loughborough University said it was “impractical” to expect millions of less experienced users to implement CrowdStrike’s workaround.
He said it would be a “real challenge” to ensure it was deployed across all affected systems.
And 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.
Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) noted on Friday that the global IT outage did not affect government services in the country. Local banks, telcos and hospitals were also not impacted.
But in the country’s public housing estates, about 185 or 10 per cent of Housing and Development Board (HDB) carparks were affected.
“Contingency plans were activated, and the barrier arms of the affected parking gantries were lifted to allow motorists to enter and exit the carparks expeditiously,” HDB said.
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”.
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