The outage was caused by an update to a piece of software run by US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Photo: SEM VAN DER WAL / AFP
The global rollout of "probably one of the worst updates we've ever seen of any software company ever" will have big ramifications for the IT industry, an expert says.
Global services are slowly recovering from a crippling software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on Friday (NZ time).
Airlines, healthcare, shipping, finance, TV networks, transport networks and more around the world were affected by the faulty update, which crashed Microsoft Windows-powered computers so badly they could not be easily restored with a simple restart.
Companies are now dealing with backlogs of delayed and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that could take days to resolve.
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz released a statement confirming the outages experienced worldwide were the result of what he called a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.
He confirmed that the outages were not the result of a security incident or any kind of cyber attack.
"Clearly this is a 'black eye' moment, not just for CrowdStrike but I think the overall IT industry," Tech analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities told RNZ.
"It's something where I think for weeks and months ahead they'll be studying this. I'd expect there'll be regulatory hearings, you know, on Capitol Hill, and for Crowdstrike it's about brand reputation, it's about containing the damage in essentially what's a code red situation not just for CrowdStrike, but I see the cybersecurity industry globally."
Logo of the American cybersecurity software company CrowdStrike. Photo: SEBASTIEN LAPEYRERE / AFP
CrowdStrike was founded in 2011, with goals to safeguard the world's largest companies and their hardware from cyber threats.
The company specialises in endpoint security protection. Basically, it stops malicious software or files from infiltrating computer networks. It also protects the servers companies store data on, which is increasingly happening through the cloud.
It is a highly trusted company, to the extent the US Democratic National Committee called it in 2016 to investigate a breach of their computer network.
"They're one of the behemoths in cybersecurity," Ives said. "And I mean, this is a company that took revenue from $100 million 10 years ago to $4 billion today."
He said CrowdStrike had at least been transparent about the problem, rushing to rollout a fix, and it was a relief the outage was not caused by a malicious actor.
"We've spoken to dozens of our IT managers CIOs … and I think right now with high-level of confidence, there's nothing more malicious or sinister. It feels like at the end of the day, this was just a bad update, as unbelievable as that seems so. I think now it's just about resolving, mitigating.
"And then look, if you're a CrowdStrike lawyer, you probably are not gonna see a beach this summer."
The New Zealand government was likely to join the international community in questioning how a single software company can cause the biggest IT meltdown the world has ever seen.
Acting Prime Minister David Seymour told RNZ "government agencies will also be assessing how we responded to this, what else could have gone wrong, what else we might have done, as is responsible in any event like this occurs".
"As someone that takes an interest in technology and software in the way that it's developing, I was quite surprised this one company could have such a large effect. And I'm sure that there will be questions around the level of redundancy that's built into systems… I'm sure there'll be questions about how a software update is rolled out simultaneously right around the world.
"I have to say that most of those questions, at a technical level, are well above my pay grade. But I'm sure that the government will be asking those questions in the days and weeks to come."
Non-profit IT group New Zealand Internet Task Force (NZITF) said the global cyber outage showed the wide-scale and potentially harmful effects a big computer fault can have.
NZITF's Membership Officer Tandi McCarthy said it was a reminder to be prepared.
"It teaches us that we have such a huge reliance and dependency on online services. There is always going to be third parties and vendors that we rely on, so we just need to make sure that we've got people in processing systems in place to deal with issues when they occur."
McCarthy said IT specialists would be busy this weekend checking on computer systems.
Ives said it could result in changes to how critical updates are rolled out.
"This is something that I think will change the nature of software updates - the fact that one bad update with a bad code essentially is something that reverberated around the world and is still, and will be probably over the next 36, 48 hours…
"The interconnection and how much we rely on, not just the cloud, but in terms of data, it just shows how vulnerable we are, and that's not gonna change. That's gonna get more and more. But you know, at least, fortunately, the only good thing is it was not a cyber hack."
